Angela Wilks, PhD, Isaac E. Emerson Chair of Pharmaceutical Sciences and co-director of the Metallotherapeutics Research Center at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy, has been awarded a five-year, $2.63 million R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health to continue her pioneering work on bacterial iron acquisition and its role in chronic infection.
The multi-year grant will support Wilks’ efforts to investigate how Pseudomonas aeruginosa, an antibiotic-resistant bacterium identified by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as a serious threat to public health, adapts to the nutrient-limited environment of the human body during infection. Her research zeroes in on a key survival mechanism: the bacterium’s ability to switch from using freely available iron sources to scavenging iron from heme, a molecule found in blood.