image: Cynthia Nau Cornelissen, a Distinguished University Professor and associate director of the Institute for Biomedical Sciences at Georgia State University
Credit: Georgia State University
ATLANTA — Cynthia Nau Cornelissen, a Distinguished University Professor and associate director of the Institute for Biomedical Sciences at Georgia State University, has received nearly $7 million in two, five-year federal grants to develop vaccines and therapeutics to combat sexually transmitted infections (STIs).
Cornelissen, also director of the institute’s Center for Translational Immunology, will use both grants from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study the human-specific pathogen Neisseria gonorrhoeae, which causes the common sexually transmitted infection gonorrhea.
Treatment options for gonorrhea are dwindling because of rapid drug resistance, and there is no vaccine to protect against this infection. As a result, gonorrhea is considered an urgent threat, and there is a critical need to identify an efficacious vaccine and more effective treatments.
In previous work, Cornelissen and her team have focused on the structure/function relationships in conserved outer membrane transport proteins that provide critical growth supporting functions during human infection. These studies unexpectedly found that gonococcal outer membrane transporters also bind to distinct sugar residues in addition to known protein ligands, raising the possibility that these proteins serve important host cell interaction functions, in addition to nutrient acquisition.
A $3.4 million grant award will be used to understand nutrient acquisition for human-specific pathogen Neisseria gonorrhoeae and sugar-based interactions with the host. The recent observations of outer membrane transporters suggest these proteins have unrecognized virulence functions, which could be exploited to prevent or treat infections with an urgent threat pathogen.
The second grant award, for $3.3 million, will be used to test an innovative outer membrane vesicle (OMV)-based vaccine for protection against pathogenic Neisseriae in transgenic mice. OMV-based vaccines have shown promise in eliciting effective immune responses that protect against N. meningitidis and, to some degree, cross-protection against N. gonorrhoeae. This project will target essential nutrient acquisition systems to develop an efficacious vaccine to cross-protect against both pathogenic Neisseria species. The study aims to use innovative humanized models of gonococcal infection to discern the virulence contributions of outer membrane metal transport systems and their potential as a pan-Neisseria protective vaccine.