Dr. Manish Butte led UCLA team gets $8.4 million NIH grant to study genetic risk factors and immune responses to the disease
Why do some people infected with Valley fever develop a potentially fatal form of the disease that ravages their body while most experience only mild symptoms or none at all?
A team led by Dr. Manish Butte, an Indian American professor at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), has been awarded a $8.4 million grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to study such questions, according to a university press release.
It would also study issues related to genetic risk factors and immune responses to the disease, which occurs when people breathe in microscopic spores of the fungus Coccidioides that are present in soil.
Read: Indian American historian at UCLA Sanjay Subhramanyam wins $500,000 Dan David Prize (February 15, 2019)
First identified in Argentina in the late 1800s, Valley fever today is seen in a geographic swath that stretches from South America through Central America and Mexico and into the American Southwest.
While people with symptoms usually recover on their own or with the help of antifungal medication, those who develop a severe, or “disseminated,” form of the disease called disseminated coccidioidomycosis (DCM), can become severely ill and die.
Dr. Butte, E. Richard Stiehm Endowed Chair, professor and chief of the division of immunology, allergy and rheumatology in the department of pediatrics, will lead a group of researchers from UCLA and UC San Diego.
Patient samples for their project will come from collaborators at the UC Davis Center for Valley Fever and the Valley Fever Institute of Kern Medical Center, the release said.
“Everyone in the endemic areas is susceptible to this infection, but we have almost no ability to predict who will develop disseminated disease and lack an understanding of what part of their immune response fails to control the infection,” said Butte.
“With nearly 10,000 reported cases of Valley fever and 200 cases of DCM yearly in California, our state alone spends approximately $1 billion per year on coccidioidomycosis,” he said. “There is an urgent need to better understand DCM to enable better prevention, diagnostics, prognostics and treatments.”
Read: UCLA-led team gets $8.4 million NIH grant to probe mysteries of Valley fever (February 15, 2022)
The five-year grant will establish a Conccidioidomycosis Collaborative Research Center at which researchers from UCLA and UC San Diego led by Butte will investigate innate and adaptive immune responses to Valley fever, the genomic basis for heightened susceptibility to the disease and the mechanisms that allow the fungus to evade the body’s immune system.
Two similar centers, at UC San Francisco and the University of Texas, San Antonio, will study how the disease attacks the body and work to develop therapeutics and vaccines.