Bacteria Researchers Tout Vital Role of Federal Funding

Confusion and uncertainty remain among the Princeton research community as pressure on scientific research funding looms from the Trump administration, which continues to roll back funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). The University received $456 million in government grants and contracts, according to Princeton’s 2023-24 Report of the Treasurer. Researchers are speaking out about the instrumental role of this funding that fuels their work.

Zemer Gitai, a professor of molecular biology, runs a lab that studies “all things bacteria.”

“I am immensely grateful for all of the opportunities that Princeton has given me,” Gitai says. “It’s [an] amazing intellectual environment, I have amazing colleagues, amazing students, it’s truly wonderful, but with very few exceptions … notwithstanding that, you know, [the overwhelming majority] of the work that we do, I raised the money for it from federal funding.”

In 2020, Gitai’s lab created machine learning methods to determine how different antibiotics work. That way, the lab could compare the “fingerprints” of varying antibiotics. If the “fingerprint” of a new antibiotic is different from the “fingerprint” of a formerly known antibiotic, it could predict a new mechanism for defeating bacterial infections, which could help circumvent antibiotic resistance. The project was funded in part by both the NIH and NSF.

Antibiotic resistance happens when bacteria evolve to survive antibiotics that were previously able to neutralize them. As antibiotic use has become more prevalent across the world, so has antibiotic resistance. A paper published in The Lancet in 2022 estimated that 1.3 million people died in 2019 from bacterial infections that could have been treated in the past.

After the paper was published, Gitai took the fingerprinting idea and founded a company called ArrePath, based at the Princeton Innovation Center BioLabs. The lab there has found several new antibiotic compounds, including one that Gitai expects to be used in humans to fight bacterial infections within the next year or two.

“It’s pretty amazing that an idea that literally was, like … we’re working on the board there,” Gitai says, gesturing to the white board behind him. “And then we wrote a federal funding grant to fund it, and then wrote a paper, and then founded the company. And then, you know, fast forward, we’re getting close to that actually really directly making an impact in people’s lives, which is very exciting.”

Gitai says the fingerprinting method has the potential to address other conditions.

“You think you’re solving the antibiotic resistance crisis, and then the tool that you developed for that ends up being useful over here for addressing cancer or asthma or something like that.”

Gitai says that federal funding makes these cross-applications possible. Without the grants that funded his initial research, ArrePath wouldn’t be on the precipice of launching a new antibiotic just a few years later.

Bonnie Bassler, the chair of the molecular biology department, also studies bacteria. She’s won several prizes for her research, including a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2002.

Bassler’s research focuses on how bacteria “communicate” with one another using chemicals, a phenomenon known as “quorum sensing.” Bacteria send out chemical signals to one another to determine how many other bacteria are in the area.

“They recognize when they have the right number of cells present that if they all do something together, they can accomplish tasks that they could never accomplish as individuals, because individually, they’re too small to make a difference,” Bassler explains.

The implications of this discovery, Bassler says, are expansive. Since scientists have learned how quorum sensing works, they’ve been able to coat surfaces with chemicals to help prevent infections.

Medical implants or devices like catheters can introduce bacterial infections into the body, she says, “so we’ve made these bioinspired materials that have anti-quorum-sensing molecules hanging off them so that the bacteria can’t do this group behavior and infect, or get a toehold.”

For all of Bassler’s 31 years at Princeton, her research has been funded by the NSF, and for more than 20 years, the NIH.

As many researchers rely heavily on grant funding from the government, the future of their research remains unclear.

“If things keep going the way they’re going, like, I literally won’t be able to do my research,” Gitai tells PAW. “I was at a party last night and was talking with fellow scientists, and we’re literally making plan Bs for what happens when we can’t run our labs. That is the level that we’re at right now.”