MSU Wins $10.5 Million Contract by Evelyn Boswell Montana State University has received a $10.5 million federal contract to help fight bioterrorism, says Mark Jutila, an immunology professor who is heading the project. The purpose of the five-year contract is to find a compound that will enhance the body's natural immune system so people can better resist infectious agents that may be introduced naturally or through bioterrorism. The contract that began Dec. 30 was awarded from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health. The project will involve LigoCyte Pharmaceuticals, Inc. of Bozeman. "It shows how successful our talented faculty are in the competitive contracts world," said MSU President Geoffrey Gamble. "We are very proud of Dr. Jutila. It also shows the strength of active partnerships like the one we have with LigoCyte." Jutila said, "It's very exciting. The size of the contract is such that it allows us to get in and move much quicker at coming up with a new drug." Mike McCue, chief executive officer of LigoCyte, said, "Our participation in this program is significant and integrates nicely into our plans to develop new therapeutic compounds." The project will focus on a specific cell in the intestine known as the gamma/delta T-cell, Jutila said. That cell is part of the natural immune system and is located at one of the many portals that a pathogen could enter the human body. "The goal is to come up with a very low-cost compound that will make it more difficult for a pathogen to establish itself in the body," Jutila said. "If we're successful at identifying such a compound, it will make a person more resistant to a number of different pathogens." The significance of a compound that can fight several pathogens is "huge," Jutila said. Vaccines, by contrast, only combat the pathogen for which they were designed. MSU will direct the project and focus on the discovery phase of the research, Jutila said. LigoCyte will screen some 200,000 compounds to find those that will interact with the gamma/delta T-cell. McCue said this will be done with "high-throughput" screening technology that uses computer-assisted robotics to quickly evaluate compounds. If the search is successful, the company will also move the compound toward commercialization. The fact that MSU received a contract instead of a grant means that NIAID will provide closer interaction to achieve the goals of the program than if the project were funded as a grant, Jutila said. He added that he believes MSU was awarded the contract in part because its Veterinary Molecular Biology laboratory was already doing work similar to what NIAID wanted. "We did know going in that the cell type we were targeting for the discovery of these new compounds would be unique," Jutila said. "Not that many labs work on the particular cell that we do." Researchers in the new project want to discover, identify and understand the receptors on gamma/delta T-cells that are involved in the innate immune system, Jutila said. The innate immune system involves natural barriers like skin, lung tissue, saliva and the lining of the intestine. The adaptive immune system takes over when the innate immune system fails to ward off infection. "The goal of this contract is to identify new drugs that can act on these receptors and enhance that innate immune system," Jutila said. New drugs that result from the project wonÕt immunize the body, but will make it harder for foreign organisms to establish themselves in the body, Jutila said. If it takes 1,000 salmonella organisms to make someone sick, for example, MSU hopes to find a compound that would keep someone from getting sick until he or she is exposed to 100,000 or more organisms.