Grant: Project Grant

More people die of tuberculosis (TB) each year than any other infectious disease. The bacterium that causes the disease, Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb), infects one third of all people world-wide. With the rise of drug resistant strains and co-infection with HIV, TB remains a global health emergency and, in Canada, is of particular concern in the First Nations. The treatment of even drug-sensitive TB is arduous, with patients taking a cocktail of toxic chemotherapeutics for six months. Novel therapies are urgently needed to decrease the length, and improve the efficacy, of treatment. We discovered a pathway in Mtb that enables the pathogen to grow on cholesterol during infection. This pathway has become a target for novel drugs to treat TB. Nevertheless, there are many aspect of Mtb's cholesterol degradation that are not yet known. The overall objective of this project is to better understand Mtb's cholesterol degradation pathway, including how this pathway works and how it contributes to the disease. Improved understanding of the pathway will facilitate the development of novel drugs urgently needed to combat this global emergency.