Herve Roy
University of Central Florida, FL·Microbiology & Immunology
Tuberculosis still causes roughly 10 million illnesses and 1.5 million deaths a year, and strains resistant to isoniazid and rifampicin, the two best first-line drugs, are spreading. New compounds that work by a different mechanism are needed.
- Fields
Microbiology & Immunology
Biochemistry
Chemistry
- Topics
tuberculosis
aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase
aaRS
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2027
What they work on
- Screen a library of boron-containing compounds with a continuous multiplexed assay that monitors up to four Mycobacterium tuberculosis aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases at once, probing class II enzymes that have not been explored as drug targets.
- Test screening hits against live M. tuberculosis in whole-cell assays and counterscreen them against human cytoplasmic and mitochondrial aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases to remove compounds lacking species selectivity.
- Prioritize hits by low human-cell cytotoxicity and low resistance frequency, and sequence resistant mutants to identify resistance mechanisms and confirm which enzyme each compound inhibits.
- Measure the potency of lead compounds against dormant and intramacrophage M. tuberculosis, other Mycobacterium species, and multidrug-resistant clinical strains to gauge breadth of activity.
More about the research
This project goes after the protein-building machinery of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacterium that causes the disease, using boron-containing compounds, a chemical class that has already produced approved antimicrobial and antiparasitic drugs.
Why it matters
Drug-resistant tuberculosis undermines the current first-line regimens that most patients depend on. Compounds that block several essential protein-building enzymes at once could become antibiotics that resistant strains struggle to evade, and the screening assay itself gives a reusable way to search for multi-target inhibitors. Testing against dormant and macrophage-resident bacteria addresses the hard-to-kill forms that make tuberculosis treatment long.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Sergei Vakulenko
University of Notre Dame, IN·Microbiology & Immunology
Measure the activity of novel carbapenems against A. baumannii strains producing major CHDLs (enzymes that destroy carbapenems) and other carbapenemases, and use enzyme kinetics and structural studies to explain how the compounds inhibit these enzymes.
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.
Karl Schmitz
University of Delaware, DE·Biochemistry
Use phosphoproteomics to identify stress conditions that raise phosphoarginine (pArg) levels in mycobacteria, test whether pArg is needed for stress tolerance, and find the arginine kinases and phosphatases that add and remove it.
The school
University of Central Florida: 15 labs on PI Pages, $285M a year on research, 290 research doctorates a year.
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