Kirksville professor receives NIH funding for staph infection research
Posted: June 17, 2010
Vineet Singh, Ph.D., associate professor in microbiology/immunology at A.T. Still University’s Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine, has received a National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant for $308,874.
Dr. Singh’s research focuses on controlling staph infections by studying the significance of an aggressive bacterial pathogen, called staphylococcus aureus, that causes a variety of diseases ranging from skin infections to complicated life-threatening diseases such as lung, heart valve, and central nervous system infections. Approximately one-third of the United States population is colonized with this bacterium. In addition, up to 90 percent of healthcare professionals are carriers, which means they are frequently in contact with patients who are at much greater risk of developing serious staphylococcal diseases.
These infections are difficult to treat as recent clinical strains are resistant to almost all known antibiotics. The goal of Dr. Singh’s research is to understand how this bacterium is able to cause disease in humans and has become resistant to all known antibiotics, and to suggest new therapeutic strategies for the control of staphylococcal infections.
In the last few years, Dr. Singh has identified several genes that he suspects are critical for this bacterium to survive antibiotic treatment. His plan is to delete those genes from the resistant bacterium and test if the gene deletion makes the bacterium susceptible to antibiotics and/or incapable to cause disease. Such genes can then be targeted in a clinical situation to control staph infections.
Says Dr. Singh on receiving his first NIH grant: “I feel extremely excited both personally and professionally after receiving this funding. The funding will enable me to test my research ideas, write research papers, attend professional meetings, and further develop my research career.”
NIH, a part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is the nation’s medical research agency and the largest source of funding for medical research in the world.