Travis Bourret, PhD, Associate Professor of Medical Microbiology and Immunology at Creighton University, has received a four-year, $1.7 million National Institutes of Health grant to study how the bacteria that causes Lyme disease senses and responds to its environment in a manner that permits it to be transmitted by ticks to humans.
Vector-borne sicknesses such as Lyme disease, which is, according to the NIH, the most common vector-borne disease in the U.S., cause significant illness worldwide and account for more than a sixth of infectious disease cases in humans.
“The long-term goal of this project is to identify useful targets for the development of antimicrobials that could be used to treat Lyme disease,” says Bourret, associate professor of medical microbiology and immunology.
This is not Bourret’s first foray against Borrelia burgdorferi. He and his student researchers have established a reputation for analyzing how Lyme disease develops. The $1.7 million grant builds on previous achievements of Bourret and his graduate and undergraduate research students.
The data used to support the new grant award was produced by three PhD students and a master’s student who trained under Bourret during the past eight years. He says the new grant will permit the continued training of undergraduate, graduate and professional students who are interested in understanding how Lyme disease progresses.
Previously, Bourret says, his laboratory discovered that a gene regulatory protein known as DksA plays a central role in the ability of B. burgdorferi to cause infection.
The work funded by the new four-year NIH grant will allow Bourret and his student researchers to determine how DksA’s gene regulatory activity is affected by oxidants produced by the tick, and how that contributes to its ability to cause infection.