A Mechanistic Understanding of Tuberculosis Progression Through Bacterial Reporter Strains
Principal Investigator: David Russell
Department of Microbiology and Immunology
Email: dgr8@cornell.edu
Sponsor: NIH- National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)
Grant Number: 1R01AI134183-01
Title: A Mechanistic Understanding of Tuberculosis Progression Through Bacterial Reporter Strains
Project Amount: $742,635
Project Period: July 2017 to June 2022
DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant):
Due to its extensive penetrance of the human population, Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) remains a serious health risk to those individuals living with HIV. TB vaccine development programs are hampered by our poor understanding of the immune mechanisms underpinning disease progression. What we propose in this application is the utilization of Mtb reporter strains to provide a functional readout of microbial fitness and replication to enable us to identify and characterize those phagocytes that restrict bacterial growth (controllers) versus those phagocytes the promote bacterial growth (permissive) to understand the basis of disease progression in human tuberculosis.