About our speakers
Breaking the drug discovery mold: Discovery and development of mold-active antifungals with Dr Sarah Beattie
Dr Sarah Beattie, PhD has been passionate about fungi since her undergraduate studies at Wesleyan University where she studied meiotic recombination in bakers yeast. She continued studying mycology in graduate school in Dr Robert Cramer’s lab at Dartmouth. Her studies on A. fumigatus pathogenesis in the lungs focused on central carbon metabolism and the role of carbon catabolite repression in virulence. Taking her love of filamentous fungi to a yeast lab, she then joined the team of Dr Damian Krysan at the University of Iowa to pursue high throughput anti-fungal drug screening. Here, she developed a high throughput screening assay, removing the ‘middleman’ of anti-mould drug discovery by skipping the yeast and screening directly with A. fumigatus, becoming one of very few investigators in the world to take this approach.
The Beattie lab is interested in pathogenesis and treatment of invasive mould infections. On the drug discovery side, they have developed two high throughput screening platforms for filamentous fungi: a luciferase-based assay for use with Aspergillus fumigatus and a resazurin based assay to screen with Mucor circinelloides. With these platforms they are screening large chemical libraries to identify novel chemical matter with mould-activity. Together with the medicinal chemistry team, their goal is to identify a lead compound for preclinical development.
The cryptococcal lung granuloma with Dr Maurizio Del Poeta
Dr Maurizio Del Poeta, MD, is a SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University and Associate Director of Shared Resources at the Stony Brook Cancer Center. He received his MD from the University of Ancona, Italy, in 1992 and completed infectious diseases fellowship training at Duke University Medical Center. In 1999, he joined the Medical University of South Carolina as Assistant Professor before being recruited to Stony Brook in 2012.
His laboratory investigates sphingolipid metabolism and signaling in fungal and mammalian cells, work that established fungal sphingolipids as essential mediators of microbial pathogenesis and has since yielded new antifungal targets and candidate immune-therapeutics for Cryptococcus, Candida, and Aspergillus. He co-founded and serves as Chief Scientific Officer of MicroRid Technologies Inc., a Stony Brook spin-out developing a new class of small-molecule antifungals, and maintains a parallel research program as a Senior Research Career Scientist at the Northport VA Medical Center on host susceptibility to infection. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, a member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation and a member of the Association of American Physicians.
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