GBS and Innate Immunity: Dr. Amanda Jones Works Protect Those Most Vulnerable
Dr. Amanda Jones
Featured in interaction March 2007 (PDF 1.4MB)
Group B Streptococcus (GBS) is essentially harmless in healthy adults, but potentially deadly to premature babies and neonates.
If a child survives GBS, it may suffer from long term problems such as severe neurological impairments and/or developmental disabilities.
To prevent this, Dr. Amanda Jones and her laboratory staff in the Seattle Children’s Hospital Research Institute facility at the 307 Westlake is focused on the pathogenesis of GBS.
“If we can understand how these bacteria work, we can design inhibitors and ways to intervene and supplement the innate immunity of a neonate,” Dr. Jones says. “The mortality rate for GBS infection dropped due to advances in care, but babies still die and at least 50 percent who survive may have some impairment - we have not done enough yet.”
Since her days as an undergraduate, Dr. Jones’s work focused on microbiology and infectious diseases.
Dr. Jones came to Children’s Hospital in 1997 as a post-doctoral fellow and worked under Dr. Craig Rubens.
As a Children’s Hospital fellow, she found her niche working in the realm of Gram positive bacteria and eventually genetics.
In 2002, Dr. Jones became a faculty member at Children’s, where her research is steeped in the appreciation and study of the host versus pathogen relationship and the knowledge gleaned therein. Her current work on GBS shows no variation from this theme.
Dr. Jones’s GBS research is funded by a R01 National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
“Innate immunity is one of the most evolutionarily ancient arms of the immune system – it evolved before antibodies,” remarked Dr. Jones.
She added, “With the population of babies who contract GBS, we can be certain they received no antibodies from their mother, thus making them completely reliant on innate immunity.”
One of the components of innate immunity in a neonate is a system of defense peptides on their skin and mucosal membranes.
Dr. Jones’s research looks at components of the GBS bacteria that are able to degrade or inactivate these peptides, thus allowing the bacteria to resist these innate immunity peptides.
As Dr. Jones and other scientists become more familiar with how this bacteria subverts innate immunity peptides, the ability to create interventions that supplement innate immunity and save the lives of many premature babies and newborns will become a reality.
“A lot of other bacteria use similar mechanisms to GBS, so it is a very good model for advancing knowledge about the characteristics of bacteria infections generally,” noted Dr. Jones near the end of the interview.
Thus, not only will the study of GBS in this context improve the lives of some of the most vulnerable of children, but it will also advance the study of afflictions that can affect all children.