Bree Aldridge
Weill Medical College of Cornell University, NY·Microbiology & Immunology
Tuberculosis treatment takes months, partly because the bacteria that cause it are not all alike. Within one infection, some groups of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) cells tolerate drugs better than others and survive longer.
- Fields
Microbiology & Immunology
Biology
Computer Science
- Topics
tuberculosis
Mtb
drug tolerance
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Apr 2031
What they work on
- Generate single-cell profiles of Mycobacterium tuberculosis responding to drug treatment and to gene knockdown, working with the four program projects on the treatments and genes each one studies.
- Measure both cell morphology and gene expression (transcriptomics) in individual Mtb cells to capture different aspects of how bacteria respond to treatment.
- Integrate morphological and transcriptomic data by cross-training machine learning models, to find combined signatures that define Mtb subpopulations with different drug responses.
More about the research
To shorten treatment, drugs must reach these hard-to-kill subpopulations, but first researchers need to describe how each subpopulation responds to treatment. Measuring drug responses one bacterial cell at a time has been technically difficult, and this project aims to overcome that obstacle.
Why it matters
Long tuberculosis treatment courses are hard for patients to complete and are driven by drug-tolerant bacterial subpopulations. By defining these subpopulations and how they respond to drugs and genetic changes, this platform could help identify ways to target them directly. That knowledge could inform drug strategies that shorten tuberculosis treatment.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Elizabeth Rego
Yale University, CT·Microbiology & Immunology
Track where and when Pks13, an enzyme that builds mycolic acids for the tuberculosis outer membrane, works inside cells and how it interacts with fatty acid synthases, using light and electron microscopy.
Sadiya Parveen-Nesson
Louisiana State University, LA·Microbiology & Immunology
Test whether blocking glutaminase (GLS1), the enzyme that breaks down glutamine, restores the TB-killing ability of Mtb-infected macrophages, using siRNA knockdown, chemical inhibition and macrophages from macrophage-specific GLS1 knockout mice.
John Chan
Rutgers University-New Brunswick, NJ·Microbiology & Immunology
Determine how B cells drive lung inflammation in chronic tuberculosis, testing whether they expand CD4+ helper T cells and interferon-gamma responses while suppressing the anti-inflammatory signal IL-10, using B cell-deficient, knockout and transgenic mouse strains.
The school
Weill Medical College of Cornell University: 35 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 59 research doctorates a year.
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