NEWS The European Research Fund (ERC) provides secured funding for five years with the consolidator grant to Barbara Sixt's research at Umeå University on chlamydia.
Chlamydia is the most common bacterial sexually transmitted infection. Each year, more than 25,000 people in Sweden and around 130 million worldwide contract the disease. While symptoms are often mild, chlamydia can have serious consequences. It may cause infertility, chronic pain, complications during pregnancy, and even increase the risk of cervical and ovarian cancers.
Today, chlamydia is treated with antibiotics, which kill the bacteria and help the body recover. However, most antibiotics have a broad spectrum of activity. This means they attack not only harmful bacteria but also beneficial ones, such as those in our gut that support digestion. This can lead to side effects. Broad-spectrum antibiotics also accelerate the rise of antibiotic resistance – a global health threat that makes infections harder to treat and even puts routine procedures like surgery or cancer therapy at risk.
There is another challenge: the bacterium that causes chlamydia can alter the biology of our cells. Current antibiotics eliminate the bacteria but not these altered cells, which may contribute to the long-term complications mentioned above.
To overcome these problems, Barbara Sixt’s research group at Umeå University is exploring new strategies to treat chlamydia more selectively. In our current project, funded by the European Research Council. They focus on the bacterium’s unique growth niche inside human cells – a compartment called the “inclusion.” When the bacterium causing chlamydia infects a person, it enters their cells and hides within this inclusion to escape the cell’s defense systems. These defenses would normally destroy the invader or even trigger “cellular suicide” – the deliberate death of the infected cell – to stop the infection.
The research group’s goal is to understand how the bacterium maintains the integrity of this protective inclusion. By uncovering these mechanisms, we hope to find ways to destabilize the inclusion, allowing our cell’s natural defenses to fight back. The researchers also aim to learn how to steer the process toward cellular suicide – a strategy that could eliminate both the bacterium and the manipulated cells.
Ultimately, this research will lay the foundation for innovative treatments that are more sustainable than traditional antibiotics and could also help combat other disease-causing microbes that use similar growth niches.
The ERC Consolidator Grant is selected by the European Research Council (ERC), which is linked to the European Commission. This means five years of secured funding of up to two million euros. Researchers with 7-12 years of experience since completing their PhD, a scientific track record showing great promise, and an excellent research proposal may be granted the grant.
