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U. of C. site to study deadly infections // $18 million grant will fund work that would help in bioterror fight

Publication: Chicago Sun-Times (IL)
Date: September 4, 2004
Author: Dave Newbart
Section: News
Page: 4
Word Count: 436

A major new research center will harness the power of the state's supercomputers to study deadly microorganisms and help the nation respond to bioterrorism.

The University of Chicago announced Friday it had received an $18 million grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease to create a new "bioinformatics center" to do the research.

The center will be located at the U. of C. and at Argonne National Laboratory, which the university runs for the federal government.

Researchers will work with the Regional Center of Excellence for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Diseases, also located at Argonne.

Along with other centers across the country, the centers here will help formulate a response to a terrorist attack involving deadly pathogens ranging from ebola virus to anthrax.

At the new U. of C. center, the research will focus on helping understand organisms that are more common -- and result in far more non-terrorism related deaths each year. The pathogens they will study include Streptococcus pneumonia, a potentially deadly strain of pneumonia, and Staphylococcus aureus, which kills 50,000 people a year, largely in hospitals. They will also study listeria and cholera.

The reality is those microorganisms are probably a bigger concern than bioterrorism, center co-director Ross Overbeek said.

"These are major concerns in everyday life," Overbeek said. "The non-military objectives are of larger importance here."

Still, those pathogens could be used for terrorism. Center co-director Rick Stevens said the center will put together a vast database on these pathogens that will be readily available to labs around the country.

In the event of an attack, scientists would be able to immediately compare the strain of pathogen used to known strains to determine how best to fight it.

In a sense, the centers will use computer power to reverse- engineer the microorganisms, figuring out "all the genes that make them tick," he said. That could lead to new vaccines, better antibiotics or even different therapies altogether.

"You are trying to find the weak spots of an organism," said Stevens, a professor of computer science at the University of Chicago, "and determine the optimal target for a drug" to use against it.

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