Publications

Evaluation of a synthetic peptide for the detection of anti-Mycobacterium tuberculosis curli pili IgG antibodies in patients with pulmonary tuberculosis.

Date Published: March 3, 2018
Tuberculosis (TB) remains a serious threat in underdeveloped areas. Mycobacterium tuberculosis curli pili (MTP), a virulence factor, is a potential biomarker for a reliable point of care (POC) test and was evaluated for its ability to react with Immunoglobulin G (IgG) in TB patients. An MTP synthetic peptide in a…

Cholesterol and fatty acids grease the wheels of Mycobacterium tuberculosis pathogenesis.

Date Published: March 1, 2018
Tuberculosis is a distinctive disease in which the causative agent, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, can persist in humans for decades by avoiding clearance from host immunity. During infection, M. tuberculosis maintains viability by extracting and utilizing essential nutrients from the host, and this is a prerequisite for all of the pathogenic activities…

Extreme Drug Tolerance of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in Caseum.

Date Published: February 25, 2018
Tuberculosis (TB) recently became the leading infectious cause of death in adults, while attempts to shorten therapy have largely failed. Dormancy, persistence, and drug tolerance are among the factors driving the long therapy duration. Assays to measure drug susceptibility of bacteria in pulmonary lesions are needed if we are to…

In vivo potent BM635 analogue with improved drug-like properties.

Date Published: February 10, 2018
BM635 is the hit compound of a promising anti-TB compound class. Herein we report systematic variations around the central pyrrole core of BM635 and we describe the design, synthesis, biological evaluation, pharmacokinetic analysis, as well as in vivo TB mouse efficacy studies of novel BM635 analogues that show improved physicochemical properties.

Clofazimine protects against Mycobacterium tuberculosis dissemination in the central nervous system following aerosol challenge in a murine model.

Date Published: January 24, 2018
Tuberculosis (TB) has been the scourge of the human race for many decades, claiming countless number of lives. This is further complicated by the ability of Mycobacterium tuberculosis to infect extrapulmonary sites, specifically the brain. These extrapulmonary forms of TB are difficult to treat owing to problems associated with drug…

Protective immunity against tuberculosis: what does it look like and how do we find it?

Date Published: October 18, 2017
Progress towards the development of an effective vaccine against tuberculosis is hampered by the lack of correlative readouts of immune protection, coupled with our limited understanding of the immune mechanisms that determine disease progression versus containment. In this article we discuss the value of microbial readouts of bacterial fitness to…

Host transcriptional responses following ex vivo re-challenge with Mycobacterium tuberculosis vary with disease status.

Date Published: October 4, 2017
The identification of immune correlates that are predictive of disease outcome for tuberculosis remains an ongoing challenge. To address this issue, we evaluated gene expression profiles from peripheral blood mononuclear cells following ex vivo challenge with Mycobacterium tuberculosis, among participants with active TB disease (ATBD, n = 10), latent TB…
Courtesy of the U.S. National Library of Medicine