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  “My laboratory is trying to better understand how these bacteria cause infection so we can develop more effective preventive and therapeutic strategies.”

  Anders Hakansson

  Assistant Professor of Microbiology and Immunology

By LOIS BAKER

Published: May 27, 2009

UB has received a $100,000 Grand Challenges Explorations grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to support an innovative global health research project conducted by Anders Hakansson, assistant professor of microbiology and immunology in the School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, titled “HAMLET, a non-resistance-inducing bactericidal human milk protein.”

Hakansson’s project is one of 81 grants announced by the Gates Foundation in the second funding round of Grand Challenges Explorations, an initiative to help scientists around the world explore bold and largely unproven ways to improve health in developing countries. The grants were provided to scientists in 17 countries on six continents.

To receive funding, Hakansson showed in a two-page application how his idea falls outside current scientific paradigms and might lead to significant advances in global health. The initiative is highly competitive, receiving more than 3,000 proposals in this round.

Hakansson has identified a protein molecule in breast milk that kills respiratory tract bacteria, which could make it a potential therapy to treat a variety of infections. He will use the grant to continue his research while competing for a $1 million five-year grant from the Gates Foundation.

The protein, known by the acronym HAMLET (“human alpha-lactalbumin made lethal to tumor cells”), exhibits its highest activity against Streptococcus pneumonia, or pneumococcus, a major cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide.

“The pneumococcus is the main cause of ear infections in children, pneumonia in the elderly and sometimes causes invasive disease and meningitis,” Hakansson said. “Despite the use of antibiotics and vaccines, we see millions of pneumococcal infections in the U.S. every year. Worldwide, approximately 1 million children die annually from pneumococcal disease. My laboratory is trying to better understand how these bacteria cause infection so we can develop more effective preventive and therapeutic strategies.”

To date, Hakansson’s research group has shown that HAMLET kills antibiotic-resistant strains of pneumococci, indicating its mechanism is distinct from common antibiotics.

“In addition,” said Hakansson, “we’ve shown in laboratory experiments that this bacterium does not develop resistance to HAMLET, suggesting that the anti-bacterial mechanism used by HAMLET can’t be inactivated by spontaneous or adaptive mutations.

“These properties, combined with promising preliminary data indicating that this molecule prevents pneumococcal colonization in laboratory animals, tells us that understanding its death-inducing mechanism has enormous potential for developing anti-bacterial therapy that is less likely to develop resistance.”

In addition to studying the molecule’s mechanism of action and if it can be used to treat pneumonia, the researchers are developing model systems to study how the bacteria interact with human airway cells and what factors these cells use to defend themselves against bacterial assault.

“The winners of these grants are doing truly exciting and innovative work,” said Tachi Yamada, president of the Gates Foundation’s Global Health Program. “I’m optimistic that some of these exploratory projects will lead to life-saving breakthroughs for people in the world’s poorest countries.”