Novel therapeutic agents from the bacterial symbionts of Brazilian invertebrates

Abstract

An International Cooperative Biodiversity Group (ICBG) with an interdisciplinary leadership team of physicians, pharmacologists, evolutionary biologists, and chemists will discover and develop therapeutic agents produced by Brazilian symbiotic bacteria. The team will target three therapeutic areas: 1) infectious fungal pathogens, 2) Chagas disease and leishmaniasis, and 3), cancers of the blood-all three of which represent major threats to human health that need to be addressed with new therapeutic agents. This ICBG has focused screening platforms for all three diseases that will perform all the required steps from primary screens through in vivo mouse model studies. The ICBG will focus on identifying useful natural products from bacterial symbionts of social insects in Brazil, such as fungus-growing ants. Fungus-growing ants have specialized bacterial symbionts that provide chemical defenses against pathogenic fungi that threaten their communities. The ecological role of the bacterially produced chemical defenses - killing pathogenic fungi but sparing the fungal gardens and the ' insect host - matches the therapeutic requirements for antifungal, anticancer, and antiprotozoal agents. Our discovery efforts will make extensive use of cutting-edge technology and genomic approaches. Bacteria will be micro-cultured for high-throughput primary phenotypic screens, and priority strains will be re-cultured for secondary screens and dereplication. All bacterial strains will be genotyped (16S), and strains advancing along pipelines will have their genomes sequenced and subjected to bioinformatic analysis. In addition, the ICBG will undertake major efforts to catalog Brazil's microbial diversity, train Brazilian scientists, and support the development of drug discovery in the country. (AU)