Dr. Osnat Herzberg Awarded Funding for Pre-Clinical Studies to Develop Compound for the Treatment of Giardia Disease

Dr. Osnat Herzberg, Professor at the University of Maryland Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology Research (IBBR) and Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, has been awarded funding for pre-clinical studies to develop a compound for the treatment of Giardia disease. Dr. Herzberg’s project, which is funded as a subcontract managed by SAIC-Frederick, is part of the NIH Therapeutics for Rare and Neglected Diseases (TRND) program, a component of a congressionally mandated program to encourage and speed the development of new drugs for rare and neglected diseases. TRND creates a drug development pipeline within the NIH and is specifically intended to stimulate research collaborations with academic scientists, non-profit organizations, and pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies working on rare and neglected illnesses. TRND uses a solicitation application and evaluation process to select collaborators and Dr. Herzberg’s proposal was selected for funding through an incubator mechanism of the TRND program.

The research that Dr. Herzberg’s group will pursue with this funding will focus on Giardia disease, or giardiasis, caused by the food and waterborne parasite Giardia lamblia. Giardiasis is prevalent in developing countries and a major cause of diarrhea outbreaks in the United Sates. The available drugs that are commonly used to treat against the parasite have undesirable side effects and the pathogen can develop clinical resistance, particularly in immunocompromised and also immunocompetent patients.  Repeated exposure to G. Iamblia leads to chronic infection manifested as malabsorption and growth retardation in young children and the rate of G. lamblia recurrence is high.

Dr. Herzberg is an internationally recognized structural biologist who is interested in the relationship between the function and structure of proteins. The new funding stems from her research project aimed at identifying novel drug targets in Giardia and the design of inhibitors that will block their activity. She established several collaborations with researchers at the NIH Chemical Genomics Center and the studies led to the discovery of drugs that are already approved for treatment of other diseases and were found to also kill Giardia trophozoites. Repurposing of such drugs for new use is attractive economically as costly clinical studies have already been performed. The overall goal of the TRND-supported project is to test the anti-giardiasis efficacy of these compounds in a mouse model.