In the News...
October 10, 2009
Professor Torsten Eckstein launches diagnostic lab to help battle costly cattle diseases
Eckstein Diagnos-tics is looking to help pinpoint a disease in cattle that costs dairy farmers millions of dollars each year.
With an $80,000 small business innovation research, or SBIR, phase one grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Eckstein is focusing on two diseases: Johne's disease and Crohn's disease.
Eckstein is working with local dairy farmers to advance his research in the field of Johne's disease, which is a contagious bacterial disease of the intestinal tract of animals such as cattle. The disease, which can infect an entire herd, costs dairy farmers millions of dollars a year in losses.
Read the entire Fort Collins Coloradoan article.
October 5, 2009
Discoveries of Flaws in Tuberculosis Research System Earns Colorado State University Professor an Award for Innovation
MIP researcher, Diane Ordway, received a New Innovator Award from the National Institutes of Health
Diane Ordway's discovery that how tuberculosis is studied in laboratory settings across the world may not realistically model many human infections has earned her a New Innovator Award from National Institutes of Health.
The award comes with a $1.5 million grant over five years. Ordway discovered that laboratory strains of tuberculosis used in research programs do not invoke the same response in hosts as current strains of tuberculosis that infect most of the people in the world. Many of these strains of high virulence are resistant to multiple drugs - called MDR-TB strains that are commonly seen in humans - belong to the W-Beijing family of the bacteria that causes the disease.
Read the CSU News Release.
September 30, 2009
Student's study of fluorescent viruses within mosquitoes garners fellowship
Microbiology major, Christopher Lehmann, receives ASM Undergraduate Research Fellowhip for his research on how mosquito-transmitted viruses invade and emerge from cells.
The American Society for Microbiology selected Christopher Lehmann, a microbiology major, as a recipient of the ASM Undergraduate Research Fellowhip. Lehmann’s research focuses on how mosquito-transmitted viruses invade and emerge from cells within the mosquito’s body, then travel through the mosquito and ultimately flow through saliva into a host through a mosquito bite.
Lehmann is using a gene from the jellyfish which makes a protein that is fluorescent. He has spliced that green fluorescent gene into a mosquito-transmitted virus. Lehmann studies the glowing virus in real time under a microscope with ultraviolet light as it bursts out of mosquito cells and travels through the mosquito’s body.
Check out the Today@Colorado State article.
September 11, 2009
Colorado State University Dedicates New Diagnostic Medicine Center
The new Diagnostic Medicine Center will help Colorado combat animal diseases that could pose a threat to the health and well-being of communities statewide.
The new building is adjacent to the Veterinary Teaching Hospital and is part of the College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. It will better enable the university to help monitor the health of animals and wildlife in the state and research new approaches to disease intervention and prevention. It will also serve as a cutting-edge training ground for veterinary students at one of the nation’s top-ranked programs.
"The Diagnostic Medicine Center at Colorado State couldn’t have been built without the strong support of our state leaders who recognized the value of a facility such as this for monitoring, detecting and preventing diseases that can have a widespread impact on our state’s economy," said Colorado State President Tony Frank. "We are proud to partner with the state in providing these essential services to the people of Colorado."
Read the CSU News Release
July 28, 2009
Foreign Mosquitoes Invading United States Presenting New Health Threats Tracked by CSU
Being a stowaway is risky, but people don’t often think of stowaways posing a risk to the health of an entire nation. But since 1986, Chester Moore, a professor at Colorado State University has quietly kept a database of incidents of the worst kind of stowaways -- mosquitoes -- in an effort to ensure that new diseases don’t become a threat to the United States.
The database monitors invasions of mosquitoes, often the result of the tiny insect stowing away on imported goods. It may not sound like a significant job until one considers the perspective that mosquitoes infect one billion people and countless animals around the globe each year with diseases and cause millions of deaths. There are more than 3,000 varieties of mosquitoes in the world. Only about 150 of them are native to the United States, yet only a few species carry and transmit certain infectious diseases, and an invasion of non-native mosquitoes can open up a new population to an infectious disease that hasn’t been established in that area or country before.
Read the CSU News Release
May 25, 2009
$100,000 grant from Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Vaccine research key to preventing spread of infectious diseases, improving global health
MIP has received a $100,000 Grand Challenges Explorations grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for an initial year of research. The grant will support an innovative global health research project to develop a vaccine system that attacks the saliva of sand flies to prevent them from spreading infectious diseases like leishmaniasis.
The project, led by William Wheat, Richard Titus and John Spencer, is one of 81 grants announced by the Gates Foundation in the second funding round of Grand Challenges Explorations, an initiative to help scientists around the world explore bold and largely unproven ways to improve health in developing countries. The grants were provided to scientists in 17 countries on six continents.
Read the
Today@Colorado State article.
November 29, 2008
Research helps identify new bacterium causing rare form of leprosy
A new species of bacterium that causes leprosy has been identified through intensive genetic analysis of a pair of lethal infections, a research team reports in the December issue of the American Journal of Clinical Pathology.
MIP researcher John Spencer became involved in the discovery in 2007, when a man showed up in a Phoenix health clinic covered with lesions and experiencing sensory loss in his feet. His doctors were mystified as to whether his condition might be caused by a bacterial infection, an autoimmune disease, or a type of cancer. His tissues began to break down, his organs began to fail and, after two weeks in the intensive care unit, the man died. His doctors suspected the man, who was originally from Mexico, died of complications from an aggressive, and often fatal, rare form of leprosy called diffuse lepromatous leprosy with Lucio's phenomenon.
Read the Today@Colorado State article.