Dr. Jay Kolls, a professor of pediatrics at the Tulane University School of Medicine, was recently awarded a $7.5 million grant from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute to study immunity related to pneumonia. This grant will be used to study the longevity of immunity-related cells in the nose, aiming to prolong their lifespan and potentially lead to more effective methods of pneumonia prevention.
Pneumonia is an infection of the lungs that can be caused by viruses, bacteria or fungi infiltrating the immune system. Currently, vaccines only combat between 15 to 23 out of the 90 known strains of pneumonia.
Kolls became a physician during the height of the AIDS epidemic. He completed his residency and fellowships in internal medicine and pediatrics at Charity Hospital in New Orleans, where the effects of AIDS were prominent.
During his time at Charity, “many of these patients were getting pneumonia, and I was fortunate enough to work in a laboratory that was studying one of these pneumonias, pneumocystis pneumonia,” Kolls said. “To this day, my lab still tries to understand how … to prevent pneumonia in the long run.”
Kolls and his team of researchers are trying to determine the life span CD4+ T cells, which are present in the mucosal lining of the nose and lungs and can recognize proteins shared by all bacterial strains of pneumonia. Kolls aims to prolong their presence in the nose so that the cells live long enough to fight bacterial pneumonia at its entrance point.
Eventually, Kolls said he hopes to utilize his research and the protein recognition aspect of the CD4+ T cells to develop a vaccine that can combat all variants of bacterial pneumonia.
“The trouble is there’s over 100 different types [of pneumonia] and what these vaccines are targeting are the sugar — the carbohydrate portion of the bacteria,” Kolls said. “Our vaccine works [by] targeting the protein. The protein is highly conserved, and so it allows you to potentially cover all the strains in one vaccine.”
Kolls said that in developed countries, the cost of testing for pneumonia for people with HIV is high. In underdeveloped countries, testing is relatively unavailable.
“One of the ways to diagnose pneumonia in HIV in the U.S. and Europe is a test called the Bonosca,” Kolls said. “It’s an invasive test, it’s expensive, it’s at least $400 to $500 and it’s not available in most parts of the world. We hope that we can get that cost-effective enough and make it easy enough that every place in the developing world could apply that test.”