Georgia State Biologist Awarded $2.17 Million Grant to Study Viruses That Kill Bacteria

ATLANTA - James Gurney, an assistant professor in Georgia State University's Department of Biology, has been awarded $2.17 million by the National Institutes of Health to study bacteriophages - viruses that infect and kill bacteria.

The five-year grant will support his lab's research into how phages could eventually be used to treat bacterial infections, including those that no longer respond to antibiotics.

The grant supports a project titled "Fitness of Bacteriophage Across Environments" through the NIH's Maximizing Investigators' Research Award (MIRA) program, which supports a researcher's broader body of work rather than a single, narrowly defined project.

"Just like we can get sick from a virus like the flu, bacteria have their own viruses which infect them," Gurney said.

"Phages can also kill bacteria but do so in a very specific manner. They also kill in ways that are distinct from antibiotics. This means that just because a superbug is resistant to an antibiotic, it isn't necessarily resistant to phages."

Much of Gurney's research focuses on Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a pathogenic bacterium associated with significant morbidity and mortality among people with cystic fibrosis, or CF.

"People with CF are currently being treated with phages in clinical trials, but there is so much we don't know about which phages are best to give and when," Gurney said.

Two complementary lines of research supported by the grant are working to close this gap.

The first involves building large-scale libraries of phages to identify which genes are essential for infecting bacteria and how genes essentiality change across bacterial strains and environments. The second - the focus of much of Gurney's recent work - examines individual phages at the single-cell level.

"The biggest hurdle has been looking at phage gene transcription at the single-cell level," Gurney said. "We have suspected that there are individual phages in the population doing distinct things, and our early work has confirmed this."

That line of inquiry grew directly from the flexibility provided by the MIRA program.

"It is freedom to consider tangents that naturally arise during research. The single-cell transcriptomics that the award supports was itself a tangent four years ago," Gurney said.

The grant will also support training for the next generation of scientists. Five doctoral students and an undergraduate researcher currently work in Gurney's lab and will participate in the research.

"With the MIRA I can support the students more holistically," Gurney said. "The biggest boon for the students will be their increased likelihood of getting their own NIH-funded fellowships."

Ultimately, Gurney said, the research is aimed at determining which phages work best against infections and how conditions inside a patient may affect their behavior. This will establish the basic biological rules that scientists will need to use phages more effectively as treatments.

- Story by André Walker