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| Jonathan Rayner, Ph.D., associate professor of microbiology and immunology, received a grant to help fund the proposed South Alabama Biotechnology Research Center. |
Rayner, an associate professor of microbiology and immunology at the Whiddon College of Medicine, and director of the Laboratory of Infectious Diseases, received a $125,000 award to help fund the proposed South Alabama Biotechnology Research Center (SABRC).
“Mobile has the potential to serve as the biotechnology hub for the Alabama Gulf Coast,” Rayner said. “This award will go a long way in making sure that happens.”
Innovate Alabama is Alabama’s first statewide public-private partnership focused on entrepreneurship, technology, and innovation with a mission to help innovators grow roots here in Alabama.
In line with USA’s mission, the biotechnology research center will promote innovative technologies to improve human health on the Gulf Coast and around the world, Rayner said.
The center, he noted, will also provide unique learning opportunities to further prepare the area’s workforce with the knowledge, skills, and abilities needed to support translational research and product development. The primary objective of the center will be to solidify USA as the hub for biotechnology research and development on the Gulf Coast by officially offering contract research services in biomedical research to government and industry partners in addition to academic collaborators.
Plans call for the SABRC to be formally established using the university’s existing facilities.
To set the center apart from other contract research entities and solidify South and the region as an innovative biotechnology research center focused on arthropod-borne infectious diseases, researchers will investigate the utility of co-administering mosquito salivary gland components along with the challenge virus to reflect natural transmission and disease progression more accurately.
This research will enable other biotech programs and companies to use the foundational work and laboratories to grow biotech enterprises in the region. Rayner said he plans to use Chikungunya virus, abbreviated as CHIKV, as the model virus system to demonstrate this innovative approach.
An emerging arboviral infectious disease, CHIKV has spread globally from Africa causing significant outbreaks in tropical and subtropical regions of the world including the United States. Because of this, the virus has been designated a priority pathogen by the World Health Organization.
“Like other mosquito-borne infectious diseases,” Rayner noted, “current animal models used to evaluate candidate vaccines and therapeutics ignore the immunomodulatory effects of mosquito salivary gland proteins and contributions to virus pathogenesis.”
That means existing models do not accurately reflect the natural course of human infection, according to Rayner. The studies proposed at USA are expected to demonstrate proof of concept for CHIKV and to also be applicable to other mosquito-borne infectious diseases of consequence to human health such as dengue and Zika virus.
