To help answer Scientific American's question, the authors seek the expertise of Joshua Weitz, Patton Distinguished Professor and Co-Director of the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Quantitative Biosciences in the School of Biological Sciences. Two tools built by Weitz's team are included: the Covid-19 Event Risk Assessment Planning Tool that estimates the probabilty of infection in groups of all sizes, given the rates of infection in an area; and a guide for estimating what proportion of each state's population has Covid-19 immunity, either through vaccination or natural infection. 

At the first ever CMDI-CDC Meeting on Infectious Disease Dynamics, held on June 10, 2021, researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Center for Microbial Dynamics and Infection at Georgia Tech (CMDI) came together virtually to discuss ecological and evolutionary perspectives on infectious disease dynamics.

“The mission of the CMDI is to transform the study and the sustainable control of microbial dynamics in contexts of human and environmental health,” notes Sam Brown, director of CMDI and professor in the School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech. “In keeping with this work, the CMDI-CDC Meeting on Infectious Disease Dynamics brought together these scientists as neighbors in Atlanta, and as organizations committed to the research of disease prevention and control.”

“In addition to showcasing the overlapping research interests of the CMDI and the CDC, the symposium also offered members of the Georgia Tech and CDC communities an open platform to ask questions of researchers in real time, as well as an opportunity to make new connections and encourage collaboration,” says Jennifer Farrell, a Ph.D. student studying microbiology at Georgia Tech who helped organize the meeting.

Farrell shares:

The online symposium drew 178 participants from across Georgia Tech and the CDC, setting the stage for continued communication and collaboration between the two institutions. The day kicked off with opening remarks from Brown and Juliana Cyril, director of the Office of Technology and Innovation, Office of Science, CDC.  Cyril and Brown each highlighted the unique relationships and collaborative potential between the two organizations.

Talks spanned pathogen systems, from the bacteria Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Streptococcus pneumoniae (Rich Stanton and Davina Campbell, CDC; Pengbo Cao, CMDI; Bernie Beall, CDC), to colonization dynamics of the fungal pathogen, Candida auris (Joe Sexton, CDC), to shield immunity in SARS-CoV-2 (Adriana Lucia-Sans and Andreea Magalie, CMDI).

Talks were further divided into research themes such as biofilm control (Pablo Bravo, CMDI; Rodney Donlan, CDC; Sheyda Azimi, CMDI) and microbiomes in infection (Commander Alison Laufer-Halpin, CDC; Jennifer Farrell, CMDI).

“In line with the commitment of the CMDI to promote trainee career development, the CMDI-CDC Meeting on Infectious Disease Dynamics was organized and run by Center graduate students and post-doctoral scientists, and CMDI talks were presented exclusively by Center trainees,” adds Farrell. “We look forward to continuing the conversation with our CDC colleagues in the future!”

Two charitable foundations have announced their support of research at the Georgia Institute of Technology that could change the basic understanding of DNA, potentially leading to new treatments for degenerative diseases.

The W.M. Keck Foundation and the G. Harold and Leila Y. Mathers Foundation have awarded grants of $1 million and $300,000, respectively, to boost the research of Francesca Storici, professor in the School of Biological Sciences and principal investigator for the projects. Both grants are directed toward decrypting the hidden message of ribonucleotide incorporation in human nuclear DNA.

The Mathers Foundation will cover work with the Storici lab only. The Keck Foundation is supporting a collaborative effort between Storici and Natasha Jonoska, professor of mathematics at the University of South Florida. Both Storici and Jonoska are founding members of the Southeast Center for Mathematics and Biology.

Full article by Jerry Grillo may be found here: https://research.gatech.edu/new-grants-could-transform-scientists-understanding-dna  

Researchers are already hard at work trying to find fast scientific solutions to the national opioid public health crisis, which the Department of Health and Human Services says was responsible for two out of three drug overdose deaths in 2018. 

Two School of Biological Sciences researchers have joined the effort to find answers to the crisis. Jeffrey Skolnick, Regents’ Professor, Mary and Maisie Gibson Chair, and GRA Eminent Scholar in Computational Systems Biology; and Hongyi Zhou, a research scientist, are on a team that captured top honors in a recent National Institutes of Health-sponsored competition to find novel, outside-the-box approaches to the opioid problem. 

Their plan, “Development of a Comprehensive Integrated Platform for Translational Innovation in Pain, Opioid Abuse Disorder and Overdose” — which will use artificial intelligence, data and molecular analysis, cloud computing, and predictive algorithms in the search for new drugs — was one of five winning applications in a November 2020 competition. The results were announced April 26.

Skolnick and Zhou have now won two stages of the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) ASPIRE Challenge, part of the NIH’s HEAL (Helping to End Addiction Long-Term) program. (ASPIRE stands for A Specialized Platform for Innovative Research Exploration.) 

Skolnick’s group includes Andre Ghetti with ANABIOS Corporation, and Nicole June with Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany. Skolnick, Zhou, and Ghetti will share a $120,000 prize. (Non U.S.-based team members are ineligible for financial prizes, according to ASPIRE rules.)

“We’re extremely grateful,” Skolnick says. “We’re very excited about this. The problem of opioid addiction and chronic pain is a real plague in America and for most of the world, and there aren’t a lot of real good answers, so this is motivating us to get people to think of novel solutions. We really appreciate the chance to put this team together.”

Rapidly translating scientific advances into immediate help for patients

NCATS defines translational science as “the process of turning observations in the laboratory, clinic, and community, into interventions that improve the health of individuals and the public — from diagnostics and therapeutics, to medical procedures and behavioral changes.” 

The 2018 NCATS ASPIRE Challenge involved design competition in four component areas: integrated chemistry database, electronic synthetic chemistry portal; predictive algorithms, and biological assays (strength/potency tests.) Skolnick and Zhou were part of a winning team in that stage.

Skolnick calls his group’s predictive algorithms “our unfair competitive advantage:” data programs that can predict in advance the probability of a drug’s success. “In principle you could screen every molecule under the sun if you had infinite resources. You could test everything, but that’s very expensive and time-consuming. We can go through this list and prioritize them and say, this one has an 80 percent probability it will work.”

Skolnick’s group added Ghetti and June for the 2020 ASPIRE Reduction-to-Practice Challenge. “The goal of this Challenge is to combine the best solutions and develop a working platform that integrates the four component areas. The Reduction-to-Practice Challenge consists of three stages: planning; prototype development and milestone delivery; and prototype delivery, independent validation, and testing,” says the NCATS website.

Skolnick says his team’s application is designed to be accessed digitally as part of a cloud service. It will use artificial intelligence and machine learning to investigate molecules that could be turned into new drugs, as well as explore undiscovered uses for existing drugs. 

“Andre’s company is going to do the testing of the molecules, and Nicole Jung will organize all the data and store it so we can have a platform that is used not just by us, but by the (scientific) community,” Skolnick says. “We’re looking for novel mechanisms for drugs that relieve pain and treat addiction. The goal is to do this at high throughput, rather than one at a time. This is really designed to test the ideas at scale. You can get it to people a lot quicker.”

Skolnick hopes to have a robust working platform built within a year. Given the extent of the opioid crisis in the U.S. alone, the faster new non-addictive pain management drugs can be found and tested, the better, he adds.

“The need is critical. It’s one of these horrible societal problems that really require novel solutions, which means you want to understand all the mechanisms of pain, but do we understand the gears you want to turn to alleviate it?”