Jeffrey Collins
Emory University, GA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Tuberculosis (TB) still sickens about 10.6 million people a year, and roughly 40% of them are never reported to public health programs, so treatment is delayed and the bacterium keeps spreading. Diagnosis today usually requires testing coughed-up sputum for the bacteria, a test often unavailable in the primary care clinics of low- and middle-income countries where most TB occurs.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Public Health & Epidemiology
Microbiology & Immunology
- Topics
tuberculosis
biomarkers
point-of-care diagnostics
- Grants
- 3 known grants, through Feb 2029
What they work on
- Determine which plasma immunometabolic signatures, combining metabolites, oxylipins and cytokines, most accurately identify pulmonary TB among adults referred for TB evaluation, compared with symptomatic patients in whom TB is excluded.
- Test how well plasma immunometabolic signatures reflect TB disease severity, using the extent of lung involvement and cavitation on chest computed tomography as the reference.
- Identify plasma biomarker signatures in serial samples that predict time to sputum culture conversion, treatment failure and relapse, with validation in banked plasma from geographically diverse TB cohorts.
- Test whether metabolic signals in TB disease drive immune activation and insulin resistance underlying stress hyperglycemia, using high-resolution metabolomics and high-density cytokine profiling in a Georgian TB cohort with HbA1c and HOMA-IR measures.
- Determine whether immunometabolic pathways remain dysregulated after TB cure and whether this persistence tracks with long-term metabolic risk across 18 months of follow-up.
- Test whether shifts in the immune-microbiota interface, measured as plasma lipopolysaccharide and microbial sequences, contribute to stress hyperglycemia and later metabolic complications of TB.
More about the research
Clinicians also lack reliable ways to judge how severe a case is or whether treatment is working. Separately, TB appears to damage long-term metabolic health, since survivors face elevated risks of diabetes and death. Across its projects, this lab reads molecules in blood to measure what TB is doing to the body: to diagnose it, to track treatment, and to explain its lasting metabolic harm.
Why it matters
A blood or urine test for TB would let clinicians in low-resource primary care settings detect cases without a laboratory, judge severity, and tailor treatment length rather than treating everyone the same. Understanding how TB drives stress hyperglycemia and later diabetes could show whether existing metabolic drugs help TB patients and reveal new targets to reduce the high death rate that persists after TB cure.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Immunometabolic Biomarkers to Advance TB Diagnosis and Treatment Monitoring
NIH · Apr 2024 – Feb 2029
Multiomics Characterization of Micobiome and Immunometabolic REmodeling in Tuberculosis Stress Hyperglycemia
NIH · Apr 2024 – Feb 2027
Emory/Georgia TB Research Advancement Center (TRAC)
NIH · Mar 2022 – Feb 2027
Closest labs
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.
Carole Mitnick
Harvard University, MA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Measure how common post-TB lung disease and its subtypes are among 1,000 treated TB patients in Lima versus 291 community controls, using spirometry, imaging and echocardiography.
Sara Suliman
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Microbiology & Immunology
Determine how pre-infection with mouse cytomegalovirus one month before Mycobacterium tuberculosis affects survival, lung pathology and immune cell composition in C57BL/6 mice, using fluorescent reporter strains of both pathogens.
The school
Emory University: 70 labs on PI Pages, $1.2B a year on research, 286 research doctorates a year.
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