UNITED STATES: Berkeley Scientists Create Tuberculosis 'Superbug'

Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2003. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.

UNITED STATES: Berkeley Scientists Create Tuberculosis 'Superbug'

Oakland Tribune (12.27.03) - Wednesday, December 31, 2003
Ian Hoffman

Infectious disease professor Lee W. Riley and his post- doctoral students set out to solve a problem that has been vexing researchers for decades: Why does tuberculosis lie dormant in some humans for decades before triggering disease? Trying to render TB harmless, they disabled a collection of genes associated with the bacteria's invasion of healthy cells. Instead, they created a synthetic "superbug" of tuberculosis, a "hypervirulent" organism so lethal to its host population that it leaves itself nowhere to run, endangering its own survival.

"We thought that by disrupting that gene we would make the bacteria less virulent and what happened was the opposite," Riley said. "It all made sense. This is a bacteria where it's more important for it to become latent."

TB infects almost a third of the world's population, primarily in developing countries. Scientists have struggled for decades to decipher details of its life cycle in order to make progress on the path toward a vaccine.

Riley said the Berkeley mutant TB strain killed all the lab mice within 10 months because their immune systems did not perceive it as a threat, so did not mount much defense. Meanwhile, the mutant kept copying itself. Riley plans to bombard the germ with antigens in hopes of finding one that could be promising for a vaccine.

Former Berkeley post-doctoral students Nobuyuki Shimono of Kyushu University and Lisa Morici of Tulane University reported the experiment in "Hypervirulent Mutant of Mycobacterium Tuberculosis Resulting from Disruption of the mce1 Operon" in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2003;100:15918-15923; online 10.1073/pnas.2433882100).
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