The latest University of Maryland School of Medicine expansion is bad news for Lyme disease and other mysterious pathogens.
Claire Fraser-Liggett, who will head the new Institute of Genome Sciences, said unlocking the secrets of the Lyme-causing bacteria borrelia burgdorferi is a long-standing interest of hers.
“I?ve been interested in the bacteria that causes Lyme disease for 10 years now, since we completed the fist genome sequence of that organism,” she said.
She hopes to use the resources of the university to find new ways to fight the spirochete bacteria responsible for Lyme as well as other common but poorly understood diseases.
Fraser-Liggett comes to the University from The Institute for Genomic Research in Rockville, where she has served as president and director since 1998. In her time there, federal funding for the organization tripled to $60 million per year. University officials called her the most-cited authority in genomics for the last decade.
“Dr. Fraser-Liggett is of international reputation, and she will also be able to draw people in here,” said E. Albert Reece, dean of the School of Medicine.
Bringing top-ranking researchers together to focus on diseases across scientific disciplines is one way schools like the University of Maryland, Baltimore, increase their standing in the world. This new institute will be located at the UMB BioPark, a new biomedical research park on the university?s expanding campus.
“The area of genome science is certainly one of those areas we want to emphasize,” Reece said. “Eventually we believe it will have atremendous impact on human health.”
Fraser-Liggett said the opportunity to work closely with the university-affiliated Institute for Human Virology and University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute in Baltimore was part of the draw for her.
“I?m just extremely excited about this possibility,” she said. “I have been looking for ways to expand the work I have done in comparative genomics and start doing more functional work.”
Fraser-Liggett has overseen the genome sequencing of important human pathogens, including those which cause cholera and anthrax, and parasitic infections responsible for malaria and other devastating diseases in the developing world, according to a university release.
