Samithamby Jeyaseelan
Louisiana State University, LA·Microbiology & Immunology
Sepsis is a life-threatening, out-of-control body-wide response to infection. It is a leading cause of death in intensive care, and specific therapies tested in clinical trials have failed.
- Fields
Microbiology & Immunology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Physiology
- Topics
sepsis
pneumonia
acute respiratory distress syndrome
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through May 2029
What they work on
- Determine how the antioxidant regulator Nrf2 affects survival, bacterial clearance and neutrophil accumulation and function during carbapenem-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae (CRKP) pneumonia in mice.
- Test the roles of Nrf2 in emergency granulopoiesis and in alveolar macrophage function, and test whether boosting lung Nrf2 signaling improves defense against CRKP using mouse models and human cells.
- Evaluate how the inflammasome-related sensor NLRP10 shapes host defense and emergency granulopoiesis in sepsis from peritoneal bacterial infection, using in vivo and in vitro approaches including E. coli.
- Characterize NLRP10's role in macrophages and test whether enhancing NLRP10 signaling improves lung immunity during sepsis-induced systemic infection.
More about the research
Pneumonia is a major trigger of sepsis. Together, pneumonia and sepsis are the main causes of acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), a severe lung injury. Antibiotics are losing ground against drug-resistant bacteria. For that reason, both projects ask how to strengthen the body's own early immune defenses, called innate immunity, while limiting the tissue damage those defenses cause. Each project focuses on one host protein. Each traces that protein's effects on neutrophils, the white blood cells that rush to infections. Each also examines emergency granulopoiesis, the burst of neutrophil production in the bone marrow during infection, and macrophages, immune cells that engulf microbes.
Why it matters
Patients with pneumonia and sepsis, including infections with carbapenem-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae, often die of organ failure. Effective sepsis drugs are lacking. Identifying how Nrf2 and NLRP10 control bacterial clearance and inflammation could reveal host-targeted therapies. Such therapies could help the immune system clear drug-resistant bacteria while limiting lung and other organ damage in intensive care patients.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Lee Quinton
University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, MA·Microbiology & Immunology
Map when and where CD4+ resident memory T cells, immune cells that stay in previously infected lungs, become activated near airways and veins while neutrophils spread through the lung, using imaging and cytometry in mouse pneumonia.
Yamin Li
Upstate Medical University, NY·Pharmacology
Expand the chemical diversity of sulfonium lipids — carriers that use a charged sulfur group instead of the usual amine — by adding new head, linker and tail building blocks, and relate these structures to self-assembly, mRNA delivery and biocompatibility.
George Drusano
University of Florida, FL·Pharmacology
Determine dose-response and resistance-suppression targets for newer antibiotics that lack such data, using dose-ranging and dose-fractionation experiments in the hollow fiber infection model, which reproduces human drug concentration profiles over days.
The school
Louisiana State University: 15 labs on PI Pages, $431M a year on research, 323 research doctorates a year.
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