Pitt Pediatrics congratulates Thomas A. Hooven and team from the Division of Newborn Medicine with their recent publication “Group B Streptococcus Cas9 variants provide insight into programmable gene repression and CRISPR-Cas transcriptional effects” in Nature Communications Biology and their NIH grant related to this project. 
The team has been using CRISPR-Cas technology to learn about group B Streptococcus, a major cause of bacterial infections among neonates. Their article and project tells about the tools they’ve developed and provides a detailed roadmap about their techniques to study mechanisms of infection.
The NIH grant the team received is related to this research about group B Streptococcus and will be a project alongside Dave Aronoff, MD, from Indiana University. They again will be using the CRISPR-Cas tools to study how group B Streptococcus surface proteins interact with fetal and maternal macrophages from placentas.
Hooven notes that the i4Kids Foundation played a major role in the research and ultimately getting their NIH award. “Important to note that this collaboration with Indiana University got off the ground thanks to generous funding from the i4Kids Foundation. Their pilot award allowed us to generate the preliminary data that eventually earned the NIH award.”
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