Tuberculosis Research by Department of Pathology Members Highlighted

The most recent edition of NYU Physician, the magazine of the NYU School of Medicine, featured two stories on Department of Pathology members Joel Ernst, M.D., and Suman Laal, Ph.D., both of whom are involved in the difficult fight against Tuberculosis, one of the most tenacious of infectious bacterial diseases.

Joel Ernst, M.D., the Jeffrey Bergstein Professor of Medicine, Professor of Pathology and Microbiology and Director of the Division of Infectious Diseases, has been active in TB research for decades. The NYU Physician article offers an overview of Dr. Ernst's groundbreaking and seminal work that challenged many of the then scientific tenets on cells infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis, including the finding that dendritic cells are prominent host cells for M. tuberculosis in vivo. It portrays in detail his research that focuses on questions of precisely how the bacteria are able to circumvent the body's immune response by delaying the activation of antigen-specific CD4+ T cells and by blocking macrophage transcriptional responses to interferon gamma.

The magazine also described difficult cases of drug-resistant Tuberculosis encountered at Bellevue Hospital and offered details on ongoing research towards the development of new TB tests. Among the efforts highlighted were those of Associate Professor of Pathology and Microbiology Suman Laal, Ph.D., who is working on developing new diagnostic tests for detecting tuberculosis more rapidly and more accurately, especially in patients who are HIV-positive. In collaboration with research colleagues in the United States and India, Dr. Laal's efforts have focused on delineation, cloning and epitope mapping of the proteins of M. tuberculosis that elicit antibodies at all stages of TB in order to develop an effective and cost-efficient urine- or serum antibody-detection based test. Her work has identified TB proteins that elicit antibodies prior to development of clinical disease and may therefore identify TB much earlier than current culture tests can. The NYU Physician article concludes with Dr. Laal's optimism that more effective detection methods will soon be established against this frequently deadly global disease.