Northeastern Voice

Foundation awards fellowship for cystic fibrosis research

Lawrence Mulcahy

Lawrence Mulcahy, of the Antimicrobial Discovery Center and Department of Biology, has received a Postdoctoral Fellowship Award from the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, the leading organization in the United States devoted to combating cystic fibrosis.

The award will support Mulcahy's work on multi-drug tolerance of the pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa.

"The role that persisters play in maintaining chronic bacterial infections that develop in the lungs of cystic fibrosis (CF) patients is currently unknown," said Mulcahy, a postdoctoral research associate.

“Persisters are dormant drug tolerant, not resistant, variants of the wild-type population. We have hypothesized that persisters are important in clinical infections, but to date have not done experiments to test this hypothesis. The funding from the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation will allow me to pursue this question for the first time.”

A major complication of cystic CF is the acquisition of a chronic infection of the lungs by P. aeruginosa.  While antibiotic resistance may not present a problem during the initial stages of antibacterial therapy, most CF patients succumb to this pathogen as antibiotic therapy fails to eradicate P. aeruginosa completely.

Collaborating closely with Stephen Lory from the Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology at Harvard Medical School and Jane L. Burns of the University of Washington at Seattle and Seattle Children's Hospital, Mulcahy will use the award to study how P. aeruginosa escapes eradication initially.

CF patients invariably acquire this pathogen and eventually die from the infection which is untreatable with current therapeutics.

“The recalcitrance of the pathogen has been puzzling, since antibiotics can effectively suppress the growth of clinical isolate in vitro,” explained Mulcahy. “I plan to test the hypothesis that recalcitrance is due to the production of dormant persister cells by the pathogen, which survive antibiotic treatment, and then repopulate the infection.”

Founded in 1955, the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation is a nonprofit, donor-supported organization with the mission to assure the development of the means to cure and control cystic fibrosis and to improve the quality of life for those with the disease.

Mulcahy will conduct his work at the Antimicrobial Discovery Center under the mentorship of Kim Lewis, professor of biology and director of the center.