Debra Bessen
New York Medical College, NY·Microbiology & Immunology
Group A streptococci (GAS), the bacteria behind strep throat, cause more than 750 million infections and over 500,000 deaths worldwide each year. They can also trigger autoimmune disorders.
- Fields
Microbiology & Immunology
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
group A streptococcus
Streptococcus pyogenes
strep throat
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Nov 2028
What they work on
- Screen serum collected from children just before a new group A streptococcal infection to identify leading vaccine candidate antigens for which they lack protective antibodies.
- Purify antigen-specific antibodies from adult serum and passively transfer them into immunodeficient mice challenged with low doses of GAS, defining a human serum-based correlate of protection.
- Test protection across mouse models of upper respiratory infection, impetigo, skin and soft tissue infection and invasive disease, using throat-specialist, skin-specialist and generalist strains.
- Identify combinations of surface and secreted antigens suited to a multicomponent vaccine, and establish standardized serum-screening and mouse-model platforms for comparing candidates.
More about the research
There is still no vaccine. A key challenge is choosing which parts of the bacterium a vaccine should target so that it protects against all GAS strains everywhere. This project uses a natural experiment. Children who are about to catch a new GAS infection lack protective antibodies. Most adults rarely get infected, likely because repeated childhood infections left them with lasting antibodies.
Why it matters
Group A strep infections cause hundreds of millions of illnesses, over half a million deaths a year, and autoimmune complications. Identifying which bacterial antigens provoke truly protective antibodies could guide the design of a safe, multicomponent vaccine with worldwide coverage. Standardized screening tools could also speed fair comparison of future vaccine candidates.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Juliane Bubeck Wardenburg
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Microbiology & Immunology
Determine how S. aureus alpha-toxin (Hla) impairs antigen-specific CD4+ T cells in skin infection, examining antigen trafficking, T-cell receptor signaling during infection, and whether T-cell ADAM10 levels predict susceptibility, using cell-type-specific transgenic mice and a human biorepository.
Michael Federle
University of Illinois Chicago, IL·Microbiology & Immunology
Identify the factor made by the quorum-regulated biosynthetic gene cluster of Streptococcus pyogenes, along with its biosynthetic intermediates, that suppresses inflammatory responses in macrophages.
Lilly Immergluck
Morehouse School of Medicine, GA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Apply association mining to antibiotic resistance phenotypes of community-onset Staphylococcus aureus from children to identify which resistance patterns co-occur and how multidrug-resistant profiles have changed over two decades.
The school
New York Medical College: 3 labs on PI Pages, $22M a year on research, 12 research doctorates a year.
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