The smallest babies are the ones most at risk from RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus. So it’s fitting that new USF faculty member Michael Teng, PhD, is researching ways to fight RSV using the tiny weapons of nanotechnology.

     “It’s a real problem for babies,” Dr. Teng said. “We’ve known about it for 50 years, but we still don’t have a vaccine for it.”

     Dr. Teng is one of three new members of the USF Nanomedicine Research Center. The other two are Narasaiah Kolliputi, PhD, and Srinivas Nagaraj, PhD.  All three assistant professors also have joined the Division of Translational Medicine-Nanomedicine Research Center in the Department of Internal Medicine and also have appointments in the department’s Division of Allergy and Immunology.

New faculty members at the USF Nanomedicine Research Center are, left to right: Narasaiah Kolliputi, PhD, Michael Teng, PhD, and Srinivas Nagaraj, PhD.

      The new additions will double the number of core faculty in nanomedicine, said Dr. Shyam Mohapatra, PhD, director of  the Division of Translational Medicine-Nanomedicine Research Center and vice chair of Medicine. “The change will allow the center to step forward in both research and education.

     “With this, we really have begun the process of taking the Nanomedicine Research Center to the next stage, where we go from developing inter-disciplinary research programs to developing teaching programs,” said Dr. Mohapatra, who also is the Mabel and Ellsworth Simmons Professor and director of basic research at the Division of Allergy and Immunology. “This is a unique opportunity.”

     Dr. Mohapatra is now making plans for developing master’s and PhD programs in translational medicine in the next two to three years. “I’m hoping now we can get courses built,” he said. “We’re going from just a research mission to adding an education mission.”

     Nanomedicine researchers study ways to use microscopic materials to detect and treat disease. For instance, researchers might use tiny nanoparticles to deliver drugs or gene therapy to the inside of a cell.

     Philip J. Marty, PhD, associate vice president for the USF Health Office of Research, said the new growth of the Nanomedicine Research Center will be felt across the university.

     “As this research program grows, it has the potential to build and interact with other basic science research at the University, and especially with physicians at USF Health, to explore new innovations and make important advances in clinical medicine.”

     Dr. Marty said that Drs. Kolliputi, Nagaraj and Teng have “sound research experience, great training, and excellent potential to grow an important area of research in the College of Medicine.”

     The trio will be able to collaborate on research with each other, with Dr. Mohapatra and with other USF Health Faculty members. The Research Center has 12 more adjunct faculty members who also will benefit from greater opportunities to collaborate.

     The three scientists all have funding from outside grants. Dr. Nagaraj’s research will be funded by a NIH-NHLBI Nanomedicine Research Center Core grant awarded to Dr. Mohapatra as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Dr. Kolliputi has an Independent National Scientist Development Grant from the American Heart Association, and Dr. Teng has been funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

     Here’s a look at the new professors and their research interests:

      Dr. Kolliputi arrives at USF after working as a research scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He did postdoctoral training in the lung biology lab at Oklahoma State University and received his doctorate in biochemistry from Osmania University in India.

     His research focuses on developing translational strategies to fight acute lung injury and acute respiratory distress syndrome, or ARDS. People can get acute lung injury or ARDS for a variety of reasons, including pneumonia or other infection, a traumatic injury or breathing in toxic fumes.

     When the lungs work normally, after a person inhales, air travels into the tiny air sacs of the lungs. Those air sacs transport oxygen into the bloodstream. But in ARDS, the air sacs fill with fluid, and they can no longer move oxygen the way they should.

     That means that even a person on a ventilator may not be able to get enough oxygen into their blood.

     Dr. Kolliputi wants to learn more about the mechanisms that cause the lung injury. He also hopes to develop nanoparticles that could be used to deliver gene therapy to treat ARDS and lung injury.

      When people develop ARDS, their lungs often become overwhelmed with proteins called cytokines, triggering an immune system response that causes fluids to build up. Dr. Kolliputi is particularly interested in finding a way to check the excess cytokines.

       “Correcting this imbalance is a logical way to correct this lung injury,” Dr. Kolliputi said.

      Dr. Nagaraj has been in Tampa for nearly six years, as he was working and training in immunology at Moffitt Cancer Center. He earned his PhD from St. John’s Medical College in India and did post-doctoral training at the Immune and Gene Therapy lab, Internal Medicine I, Uni-Clinic, in Germany.

      Dr. Nagaraj’s research centers on the mechanism of tolerance in chronic inflammatory conditions and using nanotherapies to differentiate suppressive cells. The cells that particularly interest Dr. Nagaraj are normally present in the bone marrow as immature myeloid cells.

     Ordinarily, there’s nothing unusual about them. But sometimes, in people who have cancer, these cells multiply and – for reasons no one understands – essentially fight certain cells of the body’s own immune system.

     “They have a remarkable ability to suppress T-cell response,” said Dr. Nagaraj.

      As scientists try to fight cancer with vaccine therapy, they sometimes find that promising vaccines to fight cancer cells don’t seem to stimulate the patient’s immune system. Dr. Nagaraj is among the scientists who suspect that myeloid suppressor cells are the culprit.

     “That’s one of the major problems in cancer vaccine therapy now – the failure of immune responses,” he said. “We thought we should be able to get a vaccine to work.”

      That’s why Dr. Nagaraj hopes to use nanoparticles to manipulate these myeloid cells, returning them to their normal state and turning off their suppressive function.

      Dr. Teng comes to USF after a faculty post in the Department of Biology and Molecular Biology at Pennsylvania State University. He received his bachelor’s degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his PhD in immunology from the University of Chicago. He also did postdoctoral training at The Scripps Research Institute and worked as a research fellow at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

      Dr. Teng’s research focuses on how RSV interacts with the host to cause disease. RSV is different from many viruses, Dr. Teng noted, because it’s stealthy. Most of the serious childhood infections are one-time problems. After the first infection, the body’s immune system rapidly recognizes viruses like measles or mumps the next time they arrive and rushes to kill them off immediately.

     But the immune system apparently doesn’t learn to recognize RSV. So people can get it over and over again.

     “There are even reports of kids getting RSV again in the same season,” Dr. Teng said.

      Dr. Teng wants to learn more about why this happens – how does RSV manage to avoid stimulating the body’s immune system response? It’s a key reason why scientists don’t have a vaccine against RSV.

      “To develop a vaccine, we have to understand why the immune system isn’t recognizing the virus as well as it should,” he said. “The idea of a vaccine is to train the immune system effectively without causing disease.”

      Dr. Teng’s research has looked at a protein in the RSV virus that appears to block the immune system from recognizing it quickly. Dr. Teng is also studying how the RSV virus takes over the cell’s machinery to replicate itself to find potential drug targets to treat RSV infection.

-- Story by Lisa Greene; photos by Eric Younghans, USF Health Communications