Jerrold Ellner
Rutgers University-New Brunswick, NJ·Medicine & Clinical Research
Tuberculosis (TB), caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis, kills more people than almost any other infectious disease. Of an estimated 10 million people with TB in 2022, over 3 million were never diagnosed.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Public Health & Epidemiology
Microbiology & Immunology
- Topics
tuberculosis
TB diagnostics
point-of-care testing
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Aug 2030
What they work on
- Scout promising early-stage TB diagnostics and develop a stepwise evaluation plan for each, supported by an Analytic Laboratory Core that assesses and optimizes new technologies.
- Evaluate the diagnostic accuracy of rapid point-of-care and near-care TB tests at a global network of clinical sites, and determine how patient characteristics affect accuracy.
- Give diagnostic developers and policymakers feedback on the performance and usability of new TB tests and on strategies for using them where TB is common.
- Coordinate RePORT country networks so that shared data elements and specimen tracking from TB and TB-HIV studies are accessible through a global data template, and strengthen sites for diagnostic studies and trials.
More about the research
Children, people with TB outside the lungs and people with early disease are especially hard to diagnose. Doctors also need fast tests that show which drugs a patient's TB will respond to. Two projects build the research infrastructure to evaluate new TB diagnostics and to run high-quality studies across international clinical networks.
Why it matters
Faster, more accessible TB tests could help find the millions of people with TB who go undiagnosed, including children and people with TB outside the lungs. Tests that quickly detect drug resistance could help cure each patient and protect newer drugs. Shared data and sample networks across three continents could reveal who is likely to develop TB or respond poorly to treatment, and support studies of new diagnostics, vaccines and drugs.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Lisa Cranmer
Emory University, GA·Microbiology & Immunology
Identify antibody features, especially in the Fc tail region, linked to protection from Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection in infants with and without HIV-exposed mothers, testing whether an early IgM-based signature predicts protection.
Adrienne Shapiro
University of Washington, WA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Test whether differentiated service delivery with multi-month dispensing produces higher completion of tuberculosis preventive therapy than clinic standard of care, in a randomized controlled trial among household contacts of people with TB and people with HIV in Kenya.
Jeffrey Tornheim
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Medicine & Clinical Research
Determine how many MDR-TB patients in Mumbai carry resistance mutations that would rule out moxifloxacin, linezolid, bedaquiline, clofazimine or cycloserine, using next-generation sequencing directly from uncultured sputum.
The school
Rutgers University-New Brunswick: 57 labs on PI Pages, $837M a year on research, 713 research doctorates a year.
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