Starve the Harmful Bacteria, and Save the Host!
What happens if a human being decides to stop eating for an extended period? Well, that person is eventually going to die. It turns out this is not only true for living organisms like humans, livestock, and pets but also true for harmful bacteria that cause disease. My Ph.D. project studies Coxiella burnetii, a harmful bacteria whose infection during pregnancy results in abortion 50% of the time and death of the unborn baby 25% of the time in both humans and livestock. Interestingly, when this bacteria infects the host, it needs glucose to survive and reproduce. But humans and animals also need glucose to survive. So, as a therapeutic strategy, we can’t just say let’s take away glucose from the host, because if you do that, you will end up killing both the harmful bacteria and the host, and you don’t want that! So, here is the catch, humans use a biological tool, an enzyme, called hexokinase to process glucose, Coxiella does not. My research is focused on discovering the alternative tool Coxiella uses and if it turns out, as we hypothesize, to be something unique to Coxiella, and not even important to us as the host, we can target that to stop Coxiella from utilizing glucose, from surviving, and essentially disarm the bacteria from being able to cause disease. In an era of ever-increasing antibiotic resistance, this approach which is simple, innovative, and yet very powerful and potent can be leveraged to control Coxiella and other bacteria that cause life-threatening diseases.
Growing up in the rural part of southeastern Nigeria, my community witnessed intermittent outbreaks of infectious diseases leading to deaths. My passion to help solve this problem inspired me to college to study Medical Laboratory Science and I was very involved thereafter in patient care and laboratory diagnosis in the Nigerian healthcare sector. However, I identified gaps in therapeutic options for many of the disease we helped diagnose in patients on daily basis, including infectious diseases. This inspired my coming to graduate school to get more scientific training that will enable me to help expand our therapeutics option against diseases. Excitedly, I am currently undergoing this training here in the Immunology and Infectious Disease program at Washington State University, where I study how the harmful bacteria, Coxiella burnetii, that causes Q-fever, uses glucose to survive and reproduce with a view to blocking it’s ability to utilize glucose within the host. I am hoping to take my knowledge, skills, and experience to academia or industry to help with the research, discovery, and development of improved therapeutics and control strategies for infectious and other clinically relevant diseases. I am also very passionate about helping train the next generation of scientists.