Rapid Identification of Bacterial Virulence Factors

Bacteria employ a vast array of virulence factors that enable them to confront and damage the host cell during the infectious process. Identification of these virulence factors is essential to understanding pathogenisis and defining targets for future development of more efficacious next-generation therapeutic agents and vaccines. Thus, there is an urgent need for a rapid, relatively inexpensive, comprehensive, high-throughput platform for the discovery of virulence factors. To this end, Vital Probes, Inc. has developed Rapid Virulence Factor Discovery System (RVFDS) which expresses virtually all of the open reading frames of a pathogen which can then be screened for interaction with host components. This proteomic-based system circumvents the drawbacks of laboratory-grown conditions, host environment simulations, and isolation of pathogens from biological specimens or host anatomical sites in the identification of the virulence factors. A typical RVFDS experiment can be accomplished in less than a month. This proposal intent to assess the feasibility of RVFDS to identify the novel virulence factors of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) which is the causal agent of a wide range of human diseases. This system is intended to not only feed VPI"s product pipeline with new target candidates for therapeutic and vaccine development but to also provide this discovery platform as a service to outside companies, government research institutions, and academic institutions.