Jeffrey Tornheim
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Medicine & Clinical Research
Tuberculosis (TB) kills more people than any other bacterial infection, and India has the world's largest burden of multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB). Standard tests for drug resistance require growing the bacteria and can take two months, so patients often start on a one-size-fits-all regimen.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Microbiology & Immunology
Pharmacology
- Topics
tuberculosis
rifampin-resistant TB
drug resistance
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Mar 2028
What they work on
- 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.
- Measure the proportion of patients whose steady-state blood drug levels meet model-derived targets for effectiveness and toxicity, using early therapeutic drug monitoring.
- Assess time to final regimen, side effect frequency, time to sputum culture conversion and final outcomes in patients who receive both culture-free sequencing and drug level monitoring.
More about the research
This can breed further resistance, cause severe side effects and lead to death. Faster tools now exist, but they are rarely used together or studied for their combined effect.
Why it matters
Patients with drug-resistant tuberculosis often wait months for the right treatment and suffer serious side effects in the meantime. Showing whether rapid DNA sequencing of sputum combined with early drug level checks improves outcomes could guide personalized MDR-TB treatment. It may help patients in India and worldwide get effective drugs at the right dose sooner, shorten the time they can spread TB, and reduce side effects.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Avishek Mitra
Oklahoma State University, OK·Microbiology & Immunology
Determine how Rv0125, a protein Mtb releases outside the cell, strips heme from host hemoproteins such as hemoglobin, and whether it is a shared core component of the bacterium's heme uptake routes.
Jeffrey Collins
Emory University, GA·Medicine & Clinical Research
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.
Jerrold Ellner
Rutgers University-New Brunswick, NJ·Medicine & Clinical Research
Scout promising early-stage TB diagnostics and develop a stepwise evaluation plan for each, supported by an Analytic Laboratory Core that assesses and optimizes new technologies.
The school
Johns Hopkins University: 100 labs on PI Pages, $4.1B a year on research, 622 research doctorates a year.
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