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UNM researcher awarded Sandia seed funding for counter-bioterrorism proposal
March 22, 2024 - by Kim Delker
Achraf Noureddine, a research assistant professor at UNM’s Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, has been awarded UNM-Sandia National Laboratories Academic Alliance Partnership seed funding for a bioterrorism-related project.
The proposal, “Countering Bioterrorism-prone Alphavirus by Engineering Nanoparticles for Brain Cell-Specific Targeting,” will be a collaborative project with Kim Butler, a principal member of the technical staff at Sandia who was formerly in the Brinker research group at UNM.
The project will involve looking at alphaviruses, which are highly infectious and can result in fatal encephalitis and permanent neurological damage in humans by attacking the neurons in the brain. Its outbreaks affect North, South and Central America and pose a major public health threat and are classified as a Category B agent by the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease due to their stability and ease of storage and aerosolization of the highly infectious virions. As they can be dispersed into the air, alphaviruses are considered to be easily weaponized and potentially used as bioterrorism agents.
Noureddine will develop a 3D cell culture model based on multiple brain cell types (neurons, astrocytes and oligodendrocytes) to study how different nanoparticles target neuronal cells within the brain. He said this project will lead to data that supports both research protection (technology to be filed with UNM Rainforest Innovations) and research dissemination (article and conference presentation) that will highlight the impact of the New Mexico’s research on the health and engineering field.
“By involving UNM students in this topic, there should be an opportunity for our students to develop their R&D capacities in New Mexico, creating a pipeline for research at Sandia National Laboratories and UNM,” he said.
