Kathryn Frietze
University of New Mexico, NM·Microbiology & Immunology
Chlamydia trachomatis is a bacterium that lives only inside host cells and causes the most common bacterial sexually transmitted infection. Rates continue to rise even where antibiotics and screening programs are available.
- Fields
Microbiology & Immunology
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
Chlamydia trachomatis
sexually transmitted infection
virus-like particles
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Nov 2027
What they work on
- Engineer bacteriophage virus-like particle vaccines, virus shells that display a chosen protein fragment in a repeating array, to raise high levels of antibodies against Chlamydia trachomatis adhesion factors, and measure their immunogenicity in mouse immunization studies.
- Test what vaccine-elicited antibodies can do against Chlamydia trachomatis: neutralize infection of cultured cells, trigger complement-mediated killing, and promote uptake and killing by neutrophils, a fast-acting white blood cell.
- Determine whether the candidate vaccines protect mice from urogenital Chlamydia trachomatis infection by measuring bacterial burden in the upper reproductive tract, bacterial shedding, and tissue pathology.
- Assess whether epitope-specific antibody responses also limit Chlamydia trachomatis infection of the male urogenital tract in mouse models.
More about the research
Infection is often silent, but some patients later develop pelvic inflammatory disease, infertility, or pregnancy that implants outside the uterus. A preventive vaccine would help, yet basic knowledge is missing: which parts of the bacterium antibodies recognize during natural infection, what those antibodies do, and whether they actually protect.
Why it matters
Chlamydia infection can lead to infertility, pelvic inflammatory disease, and pregnancies that implant outside the uterus, and its prevalence keeps rising despite effective antibiotics. By pinpointing which antibody targets and antibody functions actually block infection, this work could supply candidate components for a preventive vaccine and a general strategy for designing one.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jeonghoon Lee
University of Nebraska Medical Center, NE·Microbiology & Immunology
Test whether Pkn1, a serine/threonine kinase of Chlamydia trachomatis, controls recruitment of cell-division components to the septum, using an anhydrotetracycline-inducible, histidine-tagged Pkn1 and CRISPR interference knockdown of pkn1.
William Geisler
University of Alabama at Birmingham, AL·Medicine & Clinical Research·Early-career
Determine whether the HLA-DQB1*06 gene variant and chlamydia-specific CD4+ IFN-gamma responses from helper T cells can predict new Chlamydia trachomatis infections in women, to guide testing frequency.
Joseph Dillard
University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI·Microbiology & Immunology
Define the biochemical function of NlpC, a gonococcal D,L-endopeptidase that cuts the cell wall mesh, and determine how it changes the peptidoglycan fragments released and the structure of the wall itself.
The school
University of New Mexico: 27 labs on PI Pages, $355M a year on research, 182 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.