Fighting Tuberculosis — Dr. William Jacobs has been awarded $3 million over five years from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to continue support of his research of tuberculosis (TB). Each year, TB kills more than 2 million people worldwide, a problem that has been aggravated by the emergence of multi-drug and extensively-drug-resistant strains (MDR-TB and XDR-TB) of the bacteria that causes the disease. This new funding is a continuation of 25 years of ongoing grant support that has aided the development of tools to genetically manipulate Mycobacterium tuberculosis. These genetic tools have been used to elucidate the previously unknown mechanisms of action of TB drugs and unknown mechanisms of attenuating mutations of the TB vaccine, BCG. In the current proposal, Dr. Jacobs has focused on understanding the mechanism of persistence, the property of M. tuberculosis cells that allows the bacteria to evade killing by drugs or immune effectors. Dr. Jacobs and his team aim to use this knowledge to develop improved drugs and vaccines for the treatment and prevention of TB. Dr. Jacobs is a professor of genetics and of microbiology & immunology at Einstein and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Posted on: Wednesday, April 09, 2014