Current Research
Mentor: Kyu Rhee, PhD
Adrian Jinich wants to wipe out Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Worldwide, these bacteria are the leading cause of death from infectious disease, as they are often resistant to existing treatments. Better drugs require new targets, such as enzymes crucial to the bacteria’s survival that aren’t found in humans. Using the genetic tool CRISPR to turn down the activity of specific genes and see what changes occur, Jinich hopes to identify and characterize hundreds of unknown enzymes, revealing new drug targets.