Pathogenic Free-Living Amoeba Drug Hunter. Interested in Drug Discovery and Development, Molecular Mechanisms, Host-Microbe Interactions, WGS & RNA-Seq.
@statnews Hopefully they learn more about #brain-eating amoeba!
Some of the top 5 #deadliest diseases which can be treated successfully if caught or suspected early.
Kerala is a prime example of this. Any meningitis case which they see they treat for PAM (Naegleria) while Dx comes back!
Virulence of Naegleria fowleri isolates varies significantly in the mouse model of primary amoebic meningoencephalitis | bioRxiv https://t.co/X7UjuikC1A
🚨New publication alert🚨
Happy to share that my first Ph.D. student, Chenyang Lu, had her first first-authored publication from our lab accepted in @ACSPublications, Journal of Natural Products!
https://t.co/EoEgylcf8I
#drugdiscovery#amoeba#naturalproducts#peptides
Shreyes Kanumuru, a talented undergraduate researcher, in the Rice Research Group presented his UG research at @LifeAtPurdue Fall Expo today! He found many of the recommended therapies are ineffective against several strains of Balamuthia and that newer drugs are urgently needed!
In two weeks, @veupathdb is hosting a Protozoan Researcher Community Meeting to discuss where we stand, share future plans, and answer questions. We hope you will be there! Please register for a zoom link. https://t.co/j4ysi4FwzX
@reenwilson@KatrinaVelle Happy to jump on a video call and show you the videos which we’ve produced in the lab.
I believe it is alleviating the initial symptoms due to the encystment, but then causing more relapse cases later on when physicians think they have treated the disease and take off drugs.
@reenwilson@KatrinaVelle It can be traumatic for a patient seeing how amoeba behave, but these experiments help us researchers understand these organisms better.
e.g. by using microscopy, I believe I know why we see more relapsing cases when AK patients are treated with azoles, it causes encystation.
Today we received ~160,000 drugs to screen against #braineatingamoeba. This will be the worlds largest drug screen against these #neglected diseases! This will take us ~2 months to process 🥲. 🤞 we identify some more useful scaffolds to optimize in #drugs !