Author: Thomas Burke

Ale and Aashi showed off their posters at our recent UCI Excellence in Research presentations. Congrats on your recent discoveries and great job representing the lab!

The lab is in the midst of our annual (3x recurring) March Madness NCAA college basketball tournament challenge! Shout out to previous winners Meggie and me! The winner will receive a fun microbiology-themed prize. We celebrated with our annual lab trip to Buffalo Wild Wings where we all ate and suffered from the spiciest Blazin’ wings. The UC Irvine Anteaters (men’s) were very competitive this year, but sadly were outmatched by UC San Diego, and we did not make the NCAA tournament – better luck next year. Also sadly neither of my Alma maters IU or Cal made the tournament. At some point I need to start asking – maybe it’s me? Regardless, it was a fun celebration of basketball, microbiology, and spicy chicken. Best of luck to all the pool participants – I am accepting suggestions for what the prize should be this year, it can be anything except more spicy wings.

This week at lab meeting I led a ~15 minute presentation on the importance of the NIH – what it does, why it’s important for our lab and science in general, and how you can fight for supporting research.

What is the NIH?

The NIH is an institute within the US Government, within Health and Human Services. Overall the budget for the NIH is 50 billion dollars – a tiny tiny fraction of the overall US budget, but a major major funder for US research. The NIH has “in house” research and also gives out “extramural” grants to universities to do research. Just to put that budget in comparison, the American Cancer Society in 2024 gave out about $180 million in grants – so it would take >200 such societies to match the NIH. Moreover the NIH often funds basic research that wouldn’t be covered by something like a cancer society. Notably, for every one dollar put into the NIH for research, the payout to the economy is 2.5 dollars – emphasizing the importance of how research is good for the economy. The NIH has over 25 different institutes that cover a variety of diseases – infectious disease, cancer, the eye institute, aging, biotechnologies, general medicine, etc.

Why is the NIH in the news?

The current federal administration is attacking science, stopping or delaying grants from the NIH and other institutes such as the CDC and USDA, laying off mass federal workers at the NIH and beyond, and pushing legislation that will essentially end or majorly disrupt science in the US. NIH funding not only pays the salaries of researchers at nearly every university in the country, from UC Irvine to Harvard to Miami to Texas to Hawaii to Alabama, and beyond, but it also provides funding to schools via “indirect costs” that pay for basic necessities to run labs – for example administration of grants, running graduate programs, and even paying for electricity and water. The current administration has proposed gutting indirect costs and rolling them back by over 75%, which would cost universities like UCI tens of millions of dollars. The current administration has also stopped the rollout of grants and halted a variety of important programs that train young scientists.

How will attacks on the NIH affect research, biotechnologies, pharma and beyond?

Rollbacks in federal research funding will have dramatic and long-term negative effects on biomedical research. This will immediately impact academic research and small startups, but will also hurt large biomedical research groups who rely on basic research to generate new drugs and new ideas for therapies and clinical trials. This is a major sector of the US economy and damaging it will have ripple effects throughout many other industries, including healthcare. Hospitals will get more expensive, clinical trails will be harder to enroll in and fewer will exist, and fewer therapies will be approved to treat important diseases like cancer, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and beyond.

What can you do?

If you’ve read this far, you’ve already done something amazing which is to learn more about the NIH and research funding, and how it affects labs like ours and the US research enterprise at large. Very few people understand what the NIH and other federal agencies are and how the promote research, so it’s our job to make this more clear. Be sure to disseminate your knowledge on research funding and it’s importance to your family and peers through social media and personal interactions. If you teach, be sure to include descriptions of how your research is funded. Importantly, be sure to call your local representatives to the US House and Senate and make your voice heard about supporting NIH funding. Even if you just write an email or leave a voice mail, and even if your rep already is pro-science, it’s important to make your voice heard.

We’re excited to welcome the CMB recruits to campus as they visit faculty and labs, learn about UCI and the CMB program, visit facilities, and explore the town. I am the co-track leader for the Immunology and Microbiology track, and this year we had >750 applications to CMB and >220 applications just for our track. After extensive review by faculty of the paper applications, Zoom interviews, and now the in-person recruitment event, we hope these talented young researchers will end up here at UCI!

Graduate students are the lifeblood of UCI’s research enterprise. As UCI’s research footprint grows year-by-year, the importance of our umbrella graduate program continues to increase. During these challenging times where science is often misunderstood by the public or manipulated by politicians for their own gain, let’s remember to continue emphasizing the importance of scientific research and training to promote critical thinking and making life-saving biomedical discoveries.

Look through the microscope and see a miniaturized lab, complete with TC room, break room, and researchers wearing varying levels of PPE. The 3rd place prize also came with a notice from the UCI Space Committee that our lab’s space allocation has been downgraded to one square foot – I hope we can still get some microbiology done? Thanks Michelle and Meggie for spearheading the creative gift and to Jessie for organizing the departmental holiday party!

Alejandro has been awarded through the Minority Access to Research Careers (MARC) Program of the UCI Minority Science Programs (MSP) at the UC Irvine School of Biological Sciences. MARC is an institutional training grant, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), that seeks to increase the number of underrepresented minority researchers pursuing Ph.D. degrees and careers in biomedical research. This is an honors program for a limited number of outstanding students; only around 640 students in United States are MARC scholars. MARC supports undergraduate junior and senior honor students majoring in the sciences with an expressed interest in a career in biomedical research and intentions to pursue graduate education leading to a Ph.D.

This award will enable Alejandro to focus on his research as he advances in his studies at UCI. Thank you MARC, it’s well deserved for this highly motivated young researcher!

Our first publication on how bacteria activate innate immunity in tumors is now published in iScience!

Microbiology and cancer are deeply intertwined, and this is our first foray into the cancer field. We asked: how do bacteria activate innate immunity in tumors to elicit anti-cancer responses?

We were surprised to find that bacterial pathogens that reside in the cytosol (ie Listeria, Rickettsia, Burkholderia) activate anti-tumor responses via TLR signaling and not cGAS/STING signaling. Paradoxically, this requires cytosolic access. The most important takeaway from our work, though, is that combining bacterial pathogens with small molecule STING agonists elicits profound, synergistic anti-tumor responses. We propose this as a framework for designing improved microbial cancer therapies, by engineering strains that co-activate STING and TLRs.

Congratulations to Meggie and the whole team for getting this across the finish line.

https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(24)02610-5

We’re elated to share that the first paper from our lab has recently been accepted into iScience (Danielson et al., 2024). We’ve discovered mechanisms by which bacteria activate innate immunity in tumors, and are leveraging this knowledge to use small molecule STING+TLR agonists for synergistic anti-tumor responses. Be on the lookout for it coming in print form!

Thank you to the University of California CRCC for supporting our working on innate immune agonists for cancer! This work, spearheaded by graduate student Meggie Danielson, and our collaborators in Chemistry Vy Dong (UCI), we are developing novel innate immune agonists that target multiple arms of innate immunity. Looking forward to the exciting work and interdisciplinary collaborations to come.

The lab’s first training grant recipient! Congratulations Meggie, get out there and teach us something about T cells 🙂