Finding a cure for MRSA
Rotary Meeting
June 4, 2015
Announcements and Reminders
Todays’ Rotarian of the week (for her 50th anniversary efforts) was Laura Grinder!
We will be deunking Rachel on Friday night June19th . No meeting (dark) on Thursday the 18th. It will be at Seascape. At 5:30 no host cocktails, 6:30 is dinner. Sign up now!
Becky Loy announced that out Tibet project has been signed off by both Beijing and our district office. The foundation is next and then we will be good to go. Our infant resuscitation project will focus on saving lives of mothers and newborns in Tibet.
Avenue of Service chairs were determined. Brenda, Keith, Doug, Rob, Stan, John, Art and Pam Goodman agreed to serve.
The speaker today was the recipient of our endowment scholarship. Kenji Kurita was our 2014 Piatt foundation fellow. He is a local student who went to UC Berkeley then went to graduate school for analytical chemistry. He’ll be graduating from UCSC in two weeks and then will go on to a post doc at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. He presented an overview of his work in grad school and where he will be focusing his research in the future.
Kenji showed us a Discovery Channel video in which he appeared, focusing on scouring the ocean to discover new antibiotics. This is a vital endeavor as there are now a host of antibiotic resistant infections. Current resistance rates are approaching 40% worldwide. According to the CDC, 2 million people are infected and 23,000 die each year from antibiotic resistant infections. It is a very serious crisis. Without a solution we are about to return to a pre-antibiotic era.
Kenji’s focus is on natural products research to find some molecule that has come from nature. We can use such bacteria to kill other bacteria and to develop compounds that may be active against cancer and other diseases. Basically, Kenji said, the researchers find new molecules and figure out what they do. He explained that bacteria produce very complicated molecules that tend to be very specific, but that is their power. Researchers collect bacteria then take them to Linington Lab. They take the extracts and screen them against cancer, malaria and other diseases to see which bacteria works against a specific disease.
He went on to explain that at UCSC they have a chemical screening center, where robots manipulate plates to screen all of the extracts really quickly. The microscope takes a very fine pictures of cancer cells. When treated with the bacterial extracts they react in a specific way. Using these stains we can see what happens to size and shape of cells. Using this process, Kenji used his own software to find a new molecule that’s effective against cancer called Quinocinnolinomycin. It works on a pathway that effects how cancer cells regenerate resources.
He concluded by thanking Rotary for all the opportunities this scholarship provided. For instance, he got an opportunity to go to a stem cell conference and went to San Diego to work with a professor there as well. We wish him well as he goes on to continue his research as a post doc in British Columbia!