LOUIS R BARROWS portrait
  • Professor, Pharmacology And Toxicology

Research Interests

My laboratory is dedicated to the discovery of new anti-cancer and anti-infective agents. Much of what we do can be considered natural products drug discovery. We identify new drug leads based on their novel chemical structure or mechanism of action. Extracts of macro- and microorganisms from coral reefs and tropical rain forests provide the new molecules we isolate and evaluate. Determination of the molecular actions of new molecules and determination of the precise cellular consequences of their activity is often the basis of student doctoral projects. We take bioactive organisms and molecules all the way from the source to the sequencing gel, and then into animal models of human disease.

Our recent major projects are focused mostly around antimicrobial drug discovery. We are developing models to assess drug action on intracellular bacterial pathogens, such as Mycobacteria or Francisella, in order to understand pathogen and host cell responses in the context of drug efficacy. Other models we are developing involve HIV- 1/TB coinfection, in which we can define selective antiviral or antibacterial drug action on the various host cell populations of singly-, doubly- or un-infected macrophages in the co-culture systems. These model systems allow us to identify new and unanticipated drug activities that serve as the basis for further research. We are also using these co-culture model systems to inform omics analyses of patient samples from TB or HIV/TB infected individuals. While this is just beginning, we have been able to generate single cell RNA sequencing libraries from nodal granulomas of TB patients in Papua New Guinea. Key transcriptional markers identified in our model systems are helping to understand cellular composition and infection status of these patients. It is hoped that such transcriptomic and genomic analysis will also identify drug resistance in these patients and personalize their therapeutic regimen.

Languages

  • English, fluent.