UC San Diego researchers awarded $9.5 million to investigate antibiotic resistance

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine received a 5-year, $9.5 million grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to establish an interdisciplinary program that uses system biology approaches to better understand antibiotic resistance, according to a press release.

Victor Nizet

Bernhard Palsson

The project will be led by Bernhard Palsson, PhD, distinguished professor of bioengineering and pediatrics, and Victor Nizet, MD, professor of pediatrics and pharmacy at UC San Diego.

Palsson is a leader in systems biology, which is the study of living systems through experimental and computational methods, according to the release. He joined Nizet, who previously demonstrated how unexpected environmental factors can influence antibiotic effectiveness, to investigate whether a systems biology analysis — plus experimental models of antibiotic drugs, bacterial pathogens and human immune cells — can shed light on antibiotic-resistant infections.

“I worry that approaches currently used in the clinic to evaluate antibiotic activity are antiquated and simplistic, and address the drug’s action only on bacteria growing in artificial laboratory media without attention to the human immune system,” Nizet said in the release. “Our research has shown that certain antibiotics can synergize with the natural defenses of our immune system to clear infections in a way that wouldn’t have been predicted by current testing paradigms.”

Disclosures: Infectious Disease News was unable to obtain relevant financial disclosures at the time of publication.

Photo Credit: UC San Diego Health