NIH to honor IGB faculty member with innovator award

Dr. Douglas A. Mitchell, IGB faculty member and assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry, will pursue a generalized, toxin-disabling strategy to fight bacterial infectious disease

Douglas A. Mitchell, IGB faculty member in the Mining Microbial Genomes for Novel Antibiotics research theme and assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry, is a recipient of the 2011 National Institutes of Health Director's New Innovator Award. The award recognizes bold ideas from some of the nation's most promising new scientists.

The $1.5 million award, given over a period of five years, supports young investigators who have proposed exceptionally creative research ideas that have the potential to produce important medical advances.

Mitchell uses chemical methods to study the mechanisms that contribute to bacterial virulence and antibiotic resistance. His current studies focus on the thiazole/oxazole-modified microcins, a class of microbial compounds with profound structural and functional diversity. While some of these compounds have antibiotic or anticancer activity, others are disease-promoting toxins.

Mitchell's lab is developing a strategy to disrupt toxin biosynthesis in a number of bacterial pathogens. He predicts that this approach will lead to drugs that combat pathogenic microbes without disturbing the symbiotic bacteria that are essential to proper human physiological function. This new class of antimicrobial compounds will be less likely to select for antibiotic resistance in the targeted pathogens than drugs now used, he said.