COLUMBIA, SOUTH CAROLINA — A Winthrop University chemistry faculty member is among several professors who will receive money for research this year from the South Carolina IDeA Networks of Biomedical Research Excellence (SC INBRE).
Timea Fernandez, an assistant professor of chemistry, will research how antibiotic-carrying nanodevices can serve as a Trojan-horse delivery vehicle in the fight against drug-resistant bacteria.
Her $70,438 grant, which is part of a total pool of $695,000, is eligible for renewal for two additional years.
Fernandez said illnesses caused by bacteria are a major public health concern since microorganisms became increasingly resistant to available antibiotics. At the same time, since the 1980s, fewer and fewer antibiotics reached the market in large part due to the high cost and low revenue associated with developing antibiotics. Large pharmaceutical companies have gradually shifted focus to more profitable ventures such as developing treatments for chronic conditions or cancer. As a result, rediscovering old drugs and using them in new ways became more important.
The goal of this research is to use RNA and DNA aptamer-nanoparticle conjugates to target well known antibiotics to bacteria that are resistant to those treatments. The long-term application of the work is to create modular antimicrobial nanotherapeutics that can be tailored to carry an antibiotic of choice and target it to a specific pathogen.
“We hypothesize that by attaching a nucleic acid aptamer that binds to these antibiotics to silver or gold nanoparticles, the resulting conjugates will work as a ‘Trojan-horse’ delivery vehicle that smuggles the antibiotic into cells without being detected by cellular defense systems,” Fernandez wrote in her proposal. “Moreover, we reason that silver or gold ions released by the nanoparticles add to the antimicrobial effects of these antibiotics.”
Fernandez’s project falls under the Developmental Research Project Program, which is one of three grants offered along with the Bioformatics Pilot Project Program and Student-Initiated Research Project Program.
Another Winthrop faculty member, Daniel Stovall of the biology department, is in the second year of his Developmental Research Project grant. From this funding, he and his students have been studying how a gene called RYBP restricts the growth of glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer. His lab is also studying how brain cancer cells turn this gene off, with the hope of unraveling pathways that could restore the expression of growth-inhibiting proteins like RYBP in cancer cells.
The SC INBRE program is a statewide $18.9 million, five-year renewable grant program funded by The National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences.
Now in its fourth cycle, the network includes 14 members and 4 outreach institutions of higher learning. Winthrop has been a member institution since the inception of the program in 2005; for this cycle (2020-25), Winthrop’s grant of $575,000 is supporting undergraduate research training in biology, chemistry/biochemistry, math and human nutrition, involving at least 16 faculty members and more than 35 students per year.
For more information, contact Cyndy Buckhaults, communications manager with SC INBRE Program, at cyndy.buckhaults@uscmed.sc.edu.
