Artemisinin is the endoperoxide-containing plant natural product used to treat malaria, a deadly disease that has killed 445,000 people in 2016 - 90% of these deaths were in Africa. The current industrial production of artemisinin employs a semi-synthetic approach, which involves the microbial fermentation of yeast containing the plant genes to produce the biosynthetic precursor, artemisinic acid, followed by four chemical transformations to yield artemisinin.

B cell-depleting therapies using anti-CD20 monoclonal antibodies have been successful for the treatment of relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis (RRMS); however, B cell-depletion showed incomplete efficacy for the treatment of autoantibody-mediated autoimmune conditions, including Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (SLE) and neuromyelitis optica (NMO), most likely because of the failure to eliminate autoantibody-producing long-lived plasma cells (PCs).

OVERVIEW

Basic Research

Primary screening to take place at Calibr. Assays will be run in 1536wp format, using vital luciferase readouts at 48 and 72 hours post-infection (hpi) to detect compounds with activity throughout the P. berghei liver stage. Primary screening will be single concentration; the concentration to be screened will be determined based on library-specific recommendations, and approved by MMV.

Basic Research

This contract evaluate biological membrane composition and functional protein presence and activity with the goal of developing products for tissue regeneration.

Fungal infections constitute a major threat to an ever expanding spectrum of immune- and medically-compromised patients. The opportunistic pathogenic fungi Candida spp., Aspergillus spp. and Cryptococcus neoformans are among the most common etiologic agents of mycoses; but infections caused by other yeasts and moulds are on the rise as advances in modern medicine prolongs lives resulting in increasingly susceptible and vulnerable patients.

Dopamine neurons in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) fire bursts of action potentials in response to the presentation of rewarding stimuli, producing a learning signal that is thought to play a central role in the development of pathological conditions such as addiction to psychostimulants, such as cocaine. The ease by which cocaine and other psychostimulants cause hyper-excitability of VTA neurons and the excessive presence of dopamine depend on a variety of intrinsic ionic conductances and signaling pathways in the VTA, of which most are still unclear.

In this application we propose one pilot study to test the efficacy of materials provided by Dr. Ramon Coronado from LSMRI to prevent disease progression in an experimental model of multiple sclerosis (MS) in mice in Dr. Forsthubers laboratory at UTSA.