Gauri Rao, associate professor of clinical pharmacy and director of the Quantitative Drug and Disease Modeling Center at USC Mann, has received a $300,000 grant from the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation for the project “Preclinical pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic assessment of bacteriophage and antibiotic therapy for Pseudomonas aeruginosa infection.”
Pseudomonas aeruginosa are types of bacteria, widely found in the environment, that are a major cause of lung infections in people with cystic fibrosis, the genetic disease that affects an estimated 40,000 children and adults in the United States, according to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.
Mounting resistance to currently approved antibiotics and a lack of new agents in the current drug development pipeline have made multidrug-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa a serious health threat requiring new treatment strategies. This problem is especially acute in people with cystic fibrosis.
In this project, a collaboration with Daria Van Tyne of the University of Pittsburgh, Rao will assess the impact of bacterial viruses known as bacteriophages or phages–a ‘self-replicating pharmaceutical’–as well as antibiotic therapy, on Pseudomonas infection.
An expert in quantitative modeling approaches, Rao leads a research program 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.