Gauri Rao, associate professor of clinical pharmacy and director of the Quantitative Drug and Disease Modeling Center at the USC Mann School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, has garnered a five-year, $3,855,901 grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The funding supports her project “In vivo assessment and optimization of phage PK/PD for the treatment of pulmonary Mycobacterium abscessus (Mabs) infection.”
Mabs is an opportunistic pathogen that can cause a variety of infections, especially in people with underlying respiratory diseases. Highly drug-resistant, it is the most difficult nontuberculous mycobacteria (NTM) to treat.
The increasing antimicrobial resistance globally to currently available antibiotics has led to exploring bacteriophages, or “phages”—the viruses of bacteria—as a source of potential therapies to combat Mabs and other bacterial infections. Meanwhile, interest is growing in the use of in vivo infection models to generate robust and informative data to accelerate the clinical translation of phage treatment regimens.
“There have been reports about compassionate use cases where NTM disease was treated with phage, highlighting the potential for phage as a viable therapeutic option for Mabs infection,” Rao says. “But these recent cases made us realize the need to better understand and improve the approach of using phage to treat these infections.”
The project is a partnership with Miriam S. Braunstein of Colorado State University, an expert in the pathogenesis of mycobacteria.
“Miriam and I have had a very successful collaboration focused on using our complementary expertise to address a question of high clinical relevance,” Rao adds. “This is our third grant together, and I look forward to working with Miriam and Graham Hatfull of the University of Pittsburgh, who has been very supportive. I feel very fortunate to have received funding from NIH to support our innovative research.”
An expert in quantitative modeling approaches, Rao leads a research program at USC Mann that focuses on employing a quantitative, systems-based approach to rationally design and optimize clinically relevant antibiotic dosing strategies to treat infections caused by highly resistant gram-negative organisms.