Sadiya Parveen-Nesson
Louisiana State University, LA·Microbiology & Immunology
Tuberculosis (TB), caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb), killed an estimated 1.25 million people in 2023. Current treatment takes months of toxic drugs, which many patients struggle to complete.
- Fields
Microbiology & Immunology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Pharmacology
- Topics
tuberculosis
Mtb
host-directed therapy
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2029
What they work on
- Test whether blocking glutaminase (GLS1), the enzyme that breaks down glutamine, restores the TB-killing ability of Mtb-infected macrophages, using siRNA knockdown, chemical inhibition and macrophages from macrophage-specific GLS1 knockout mice.
- Measure how GLS1 loss changes macrophage defenses against Mtb, including bacterial burden inside cells, phagocytosis, oxidative burst, inflammatory responses, apoptosis and metabolism.
- Determine whether removing GLS1 only in macrophages improves clearance of Mtb from mouse lungs, by infecting macGLS1-KO mice and tracking lung bacterial load, survival, lung pathology and immune responses.
More about the research
One alternative is host-directed therapy: instead of attacking the bacterium directly, it strengthens the patient's own cells against infection. Mtb lives and multiplies inside macrophages, the lung immune cells that normally swallow and destroy microbes. These infected macrophages ramp up their use of glutamine, an amino acid. This change appears to help the bacteria survive.
Why it matters
Tuberculosis treatment is long and toxic, which leads to poor adherence and worse outcomes. If blocking the macrophage enzyme GLS1 helps immune cells clear Mtb, GLS1 could become a target for host-directed therapies. Such drugs could be added to standard TB treatment to shorten it or reduce its side effects.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Sara Suliman
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Microbiology & Immunology
Determine how pre-infection with mouse cytomegalovirus one month before Mycobacterium tuberculosis affects survival, lung pathology and immune cell composition in C57BL/6 mice, using fluorescent reporter strains of both pathogens.
Mushtaq Ahmed
University of Chicago, IL·Microbiology & Immunology
Determine whether bone morphogenetic protein (BMP) signaling, a lung development and repair pathway, is required to control Mycobacterium tuberculosis and prevent reactivation of latent TB.
William Durante
University of Missouri-Columbia, MO·Physiology
Determine how glutaminase-1 (GLS1), an enzyme that converts glutamine to glutamate and ammonia, controls the growth, migration, collagen production and survival of vascular smooth muscle cells, using GLS1 gene delivery and tests of each breakdown product.
The school
Louisiana State University: 15 labs on PI Pages, $431M a year on research, 323 research doctorates a year.
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