EMBL Hamburg News
Renewed attack launched on Tuberculosis
Mtb interacting with macrophages. Courtesy of Volker Brinkmann, Core Facility Microscopy, Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology, Berlin
Together with international collaborators from 13 laboratories, EMBL scientists from Hamburg and from Heidelberg will contribute to a new project funded by the FP7 programme of the European Commission to understand the Systems Biology of Tuberculosis. SysteMTb is coordinated by Luis Serrano from the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona and will kick off on April 1st 2010.
Tuberculosis has been known to man for 1000’s of years with traces of the bacteria which causes the disease, Mycobacterium Tuberculosis, found in 3000 year old Egyptian Mummies. It is an airborne disease which usually attacks the lungs, and infections can remain latent for many years before the disease becomes active. Current treatment is a long course of antibiotics, but the increase in multiple resistant strains and secondary infections have meant that this has become less effective and novel treatment is urgently needed.
Tuberculosis has been a major research focus at EMBL Hamburg for many years, and this new international effort will hopefully bring scientists closer to beating this deadly killer. Coordinated by Luis Serrano from the CRG in Barcelona, and funded by the European Commission FP7 programme, SysteMTb aims to better understand the disease by looking at how Mycobacterium survives in and outside living cells and how it attacks the human immune system.
“At EMBL Hamburg our expertise lies in using a structural biology approach to try and understand the function of Mycobacterium Tuberculosis and identify potential drug targets”, explains Matthias Wilmanns, “this project brings together scientists from several complementary disciplines, and together we hope to better understand the bigger picture”. The scientific project manager Michela Bertero underlines that “if we want to know better how to fight against this thousand year killer, we will have to work hard together to better understand its lifestyle and killing strategies”.