The USA Center for Lung Biology at the University of South Alabama College of Medicine recently announced the recipients of the 2021 Murray Bander Faculty Development Awards. The $5,000 awards, which provide support for one year, are intended to foster innovative discoveries in pulmonary research.
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| Jonathon Audia, Ph.D., and Amanda Tuckey |
Jonathon Audia, Ph.D., professor of microbiology and immunology, and Amanda Tuckey, a basic medical sciences graduate student, are focused on describing the role amyloid-beta plays in the host's innate immune defense.
While amyloid-beta is best known for its harmful plaque-forming property in dementias such as Alzheimer's disease, this aggregation property also is implicated to have antibiotic-like properties, Tuckey said.
“With this award, we will utilize an innovative technique, single-cell RNA sequencing, to determine how gene expression profiles of individual lung cells differ between wild-type and amyloid precursor protein knockout (APP KO) mice in response to infection,” Tuckey said. “Our overall goal is to identify specific proteins and cell types regulated by amyloid-beta towards developing novel therapies to combat critical illnesses such as pneumonia and sepsis.”
Audia and Tuckey are collaborating with Robert Barrington, Ph.D., associate professor of microbiology and immunology, who directs the Flow Cytometry Core Laboratory at the USA College of Medicine. The shared-resource lab runs the 10x Genomics platform they will use for their project.
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| Michael Francis, Ph.D., and Lyudmila Racheck, Ph.D. |
Michael Francis, Ph.D., assistant professor of physiology and cell biology, and
Lyudmila Rachek, Ph.D., assistant professor of pharmacology, aim to understand the mechanisms of vascular complications associated with diabetes. They particularly are interested in pulmonary circulation, where vascular dysfunction is known to contribute to morbidity but is clinically underappreciated.
“With new experimental and analytics technologies developed in our lab and at the College of Medicine, we are finally able to answer fundamental questions about diabetic vascular abnormalities and hopefully resolve disparities in the scientific literature on the topic,” Francis said.
Francis said the award provides crucial seed funding for the project, which they will use to perform pilot studies toward their research goals. “We plan to leverage the results of these studies as preliminary data for collaborative extramural funding in the form of a National Institutes of Health R01 proposal,” he said.
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| Jin Kim, D.V.M., Ph.D. |
Jin Kim, D.V.M., Ph.D., assistant professor of microbiology and immunology, seeks to extend the effective antiviral treatment window for influenza A infection, which is currently limited to 24 to 48 hours of symptom onset.
“Although rapid diagnostic tests for flu patients are widely available from healthcare providers, antiviral treatment within the effective window is often missed due to procrastinating clinic visits and diagnostic sensitivity,” Kim said.
Using bioluminescent influenza virus in mice, Kim will determine which treatment regimens extend the treatment window.
“Unlike typical terminal animal studies where many animals are required to provide the information for viral replication and clearance, our in vivo imaging technique will enable us to design a dynamic range of combination therapy, where dose, combinations and treatment intervals can be varied longitudinally,” Kim said.
The USA Center for Lung Biology comprises more than 40 faculty members and 25 postdoctoral fellows, clinical fellows, and graduate students representing both basic and clinical science departments, all interested in aspects of lung biology.
Murray Bander, a World War II veteran who moved from New York to Mobile to operate a clothing shop, died from complications of pneumonia in 2001. He left his estate to the USA College of Medicine in 2003, and the Murray Bander Endowment for the Center for Lung Biology was established to support scholarly activities in lung biology.
