| Hultgren to Present Bladder Infection Research at Microbiology Meeting
Orlando, May 23, 2001– Scott J. Hultgren, Ph.D., will discuss his research on urinary tract infections from 8-10:30 a.m. ET on May 23 at the 101st General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology to be held at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Fla. Hultgren also will participate in a press conference at 11:30 a.m. ET following the symposium.
Hultgren is the Helen L. Stoever Professor of Molecular Microbiology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. He studies ways in which bacteria attach to human tissue, a key event in the onset of disease. He works with E. coli, a bacterium that causes urinary tract infections, which afflict more than half of American women at some point in their lives, as well as some men.
"Our strategy is to decipher the molecular basis of how bacteria cause disease and to use this information to design vaccines and novel antibacterial therapeutics," says Hultgren. "There is an urgent need for such products now that bacterial infections are becoming increasingly more difficult to treat due to the rising tide of antibiotic-resistant microbes."
Like many other bacteria, E. coli uses sticky hairs to attache to host tissue. The hairs, or pili, are sticky because their feathery tips contain a protein called an adhesin, which fits into receptors in the urinary tract like keys into locks. Anchored in place, the bacterium can multiply rather than being washed away by the stream of urine.
Hultgren recently discovered that a protein called a chaperone plays an essential role in pilus assembly. Chaperones escort pilus subunits to the assembly point in the cell and ensure that they fit together properly. Hultgren also showed that chaperones provide the subunits with the information needed to fold from strings of amino acids into three-dimensional proteins.
Hultgren's team hopes that studying the chaperone's function and shape may lead to a drug that will prevent it from locking onto subunits. If bacteria could not produce pili, they could not attach and infect.
Another strategy for preventing attachment targets the adhesin, the sticky tip of the pilus. Using their knowledge of pilus assembly, Hultgren and his collaborators genetically modified bacteria to overproduce the adhesin for use as a vaccine. The vaccine primes the immune system to produce antibodies that block the adhesins on invading bacteria, flagging them for destruction. Hultgren's lab is collaborating on the vaccine with a Maryland biotech company called MedImmune Inc., which has completed the first stage of human trials.
"Our work represents a unique opportunity to blend multiple new technologies including a powerful genetic system and X-ray crystallography, and several academic disciplines such as immunology and cell biology to study the molecular details of host-pathogen interactions that occur during urinary tract infections caused by E. coli," says Hultgren. "This work also has implications for the pathology of Alzheimer’s and other diseases."
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The full-time and volunteer faculty of Washington University School of Medicine are the physicians of Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children's hospitals. The School of Medicine is one of the leading medical research, teaching and patient care institutions in the nation. Through its affiliations with Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children's hospitals, the School of Medicine is linked to BJC HealthCare.
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