Volume 5, Issue 38 July/August 2008
Center Takes Aim at Infectious Diseases
Artemisinin is the most effective-and expensive-antimalarial drug on the market. Berkeley professor of chemical engineering and CEND faculty affiliate Jay Keasling is bioengineering bacteria to synthesize the drug and make it more affordable. Photo credit: Scott Bauer
For much of the world, death comes couched in an everyday event: a cough, an insect bite, lovemaking with an unfaithful partner. From these ordinary incidents, millions of people every year contract HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria. These "big three" killers, plus a dozen other neglected diseases such as river blindness and dengue fever, place a terrible medical and economic burden upon the people of Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia.
Yet vaccines and treatments for many of these diseases do not exist. Bringing new drugs to market is extremely expensive, and developing nations cannot afford to buy costly medicines. Uncertain about recouping their development costs, big pharmaceutical companies have turned their research efforts elsewhere.
UC Berkeley is stepping into the breach with the Center for Emerging and Neglected Diseases (CEND). Launched this May, the Center aims to overcome the hurdles between innovative ideas and patient treatments. It will act as an international hub for academic laboratories, commercial biotechnology companies and clinical researchers to bring promising treatments to patients.
CEND scientists will have access to a biosafety level 3 lab to research pathogens such as tuberculosis. The lab provides a safe and contained environment to study bacterial, viral and mammalian cell cultures on campus. Photo credit: Michael Schelle
"To me, the role of the university here is absolutely essential," says W. Geoffrey Owen, dean of the Biological Sciences Division, who nurtured the Center into being over the past three years. "So many people die every year from diseases that aren't treated. Meanwhile, we're facing potential disaster with multi-drug resistant tuberculosis, HIV, and staphylococcus. With this collaboration between world-class scientists, hopefully we can feed the pipeline with discoveries of new drugs."
"We're ensuring that faculty members who have basic research ideas can connect with people who know biotechnology or neglected diseases to produce useful products," says Temina Madon, executive director of CEND. "You feel there's an imperative, an urgency, because there are tens of thousands of people dying every day from just a few diseases."
Madon has already been knocking on doors to connect faculty with complementary interests. The Center now has nearly 50 affiliated faculty in the sciences as well as public policy, law, business, and economics. CEND is also part of the Berkeley Alliance for Global Health, along with the Center for Global Public Health, an effort spearheaded by the School of Public Health.
"The technology and science are far enough advanced that we're ready to attack neglected diseases on a global scale," says Tom Alber, faculty Director of CEND and a Berkeley professor of biochemistry and molecular biology who studies tuberculosis. "The university can bring together the best thinking about what new knowledge is needed, what approaches need to be invented to eradicate malaria and resistant strains of tuberculosis."
Berkeley graduate student Lisa Prach is working with colleagues in South Africa to determine whether a molecule associated with tuberculosis in mice is also important in human disease.
CEND will extend Berkeley's neglected disease research far beyond campus gates. The Center will help Berkeley faculty collaborate with scientists and physicians in countries most affected by neglected diseases. Foreign exchange programs for students and scientists studying neglected diseases will be a top priority. For example, engineering graduate students from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur will visit Berkeley this summer. The goal is to make Berkeley's first-class scientific equipment, training, and facilities available to neglected disease researchers in countries around the world.
Meanwhile, Berkeley students and faculty will travel to countries afflicted by these diseases. Witness firsthand how these diseases are treated and patients respond will help them identify fruitful research approaches. For example, Alber graduate student Lisa Prach came across a collection of TB patient records, disease strains and tissues in South Africa, where extremely drug-resistant TB is on the rise. She will use the collection to determine whether the TB molecule she is studying is in fact associated with sickness in humans.
A forum to connect scientists studying infectious disease will make a world of difference, Alber says. "One person will say, here's a problem. The next will say, I can get fifty percent of the way to the solution, and the third person will say oh, the rest is really easy-and then you're there. Groups working together sometimes have traction on something that none of them could have solved on their own."
The bottom line is to bring solutions to these devastating diseases into the realm of possibility. "People don't think about solutions to projects that they know in their hearts are impossible," Alber says. "The Center will free our faculty to think on a scale that they wouldn't alone."