Cancer therapies show promise in combating tuberculosis

What could cancer teach us about tuberculosis? That's a question Meenal Datta has been chasing since she was a graduate student.

"It was the first time we showed definitively that there was this pathophysiological similarity between these two diseases that present with different causes and symptoms," said Datta, assistant professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering at the University of Notre Dame."Cancer doesn't sound anything like an infectious disease. And yet, here are two different diseases with the same problem of dysfunctional blood vessels.

The study confirmed that a similar phenomenon is occurring in granulomas -- too much cell mass and protein scaffolding. This impaired function makes blood flow through blood vessels nearly impossible, crippling the ability to get a medication to the tuberculosis disease site. When the researchers applied the host-directed therapies losartan and bevacizumab along with antibiotics, they showed improved drug delivery and antibiotic concentration within granulomas.

For Datta, this study caps off a stretch of tuberculosis research that started when she began her doctoral research at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in 2011, and has spanned multiple phases of her career. Tuberculosis, although largely controlled in the U.S., is still considered one of the deadliest infectious diseases worldwide.

"I do believe that really is an advantage of being an engineer. It's easier for me to sometimes make connections between contexts that seem disparate," Datta said."We depend on our life science and clinical colleagues to walk through those details, but engineers are very good at approaching complex problems from a simplified systems approach."

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