A Success Story of a Scientist

As a newly appointed Assistant Professor in the Department of Pathobiological Sciences at Louisiana State University, Samithamby Jeyaseelan (Jey) admits that he would not be where he is now without the support of the NIH-COBRE Center for Experimental Infectious Disease Research (CEIDR) grant administered by the Division of Biotechnology & Molecular Medicine (BIOMMED). The COBRE-CEIDR provided initial support at a crucial time in his career at LSU and was a major attraction for him to come to LSU.

Jey, who holds a DVM from the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka and a Ph.D. in Microbiology/Immunology from the University of Minnesota, studies neutrophil recruitment, the most important initial host innate immune mechanism against bacteria, which is how the immune system eliminates bacteria at the site where disease-causing microbes enter the body. He became focused on the lung as a site of infection once he began his PhD work under the guidance of Samuel Maheswaran, DVM, PhD. Jey has identified the elusive receptor for the most important virulence factor, leukotoxin, secreted by the causative bacterium, Mannheimia haemolytica, which causes an extremely important lung disease in ruminants, Bovine Pneumonic Pasteurellosis”. He has published 8 papers from his PhD work: 3 first-authored, 3 co-authored, and 2 invited reviews. In addition, Jey has received numerous accolades for his scientific accomplishments and community activities at the University of Minnesota, including Liz-Atac Award by the College of Veterinary Medicine, Student Leadership Award from the Council of Graduate Students at the University of Minnesota, Don Kahn Award in Immunology by the American College of Veterinary Microbiologists and a Graduate Student Travel Award from the American Society of Microbiolgists. Jey states that his PhD work gave him great enthusiasm to work on lung diseases for his entire career. Jey has done his initial postdoctoral work with Craig Roy, PhD, at Yale University where he has learned about the interaction of an intracellular pathogen, Legionella pneumophila with the host He has performed his subsequent post-doctoral work with Scott Worthen, MD, a leading researcher in neutrophil signaling at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, who was in the Department of Medicine at National Jewish Medical and Research Center at that time. Jey was promoted to the rank of Instructor and Assistant Professor at National Jewish Medical and Research Center afterwards. In fact, Jey has published 18 articles and 10 reviews/commentaries. He has extensive collaborations with the New Orleans Medical School and published his first paper from Louisiana with Steve Nelson’s, the Dean of LSUHSC, group and the first paper from his lab. He has been invited to write a review a in the field of neutrophil accumulation in Bacterial Pneumonia by a prestigious journal “Infection and Immunity”. Because of his outstanding contribution to the field, Jey has been invited to serve as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Immunology, one of the esteemed journals with an impact factor of 6.5. Jey serves as a Technical Editor of Journal of Animal and Veterinary Advances”, he is an ad-hoc reviewer for numerous journals, including Infection and Immunity, American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, American Journal of Respiratory Cell and Molecular Biology, American Journal of Pathology, European Respiratory Journal, Journal of Medical Microbiology and Immunology, American Journal of Physiology - Lung Cellular and Molecular Physiology, Intensive Care Medicine, Genome Biology, Clinical and Vaccine Immunology, Physiological Genomics, Proceedings of the American Thoracic Society, and Respiratory Research. Furthermore, Jey has regularly been invited to present his work at National and International meetings and at numerous instititutions in the U.S. and worldwide. In 2007, Jey moved to the Department of Pathobiolgical Sciences, School of Veterinary Medicine as a tenure-track assistant professor. About one year later he has secured his first major (R01) grant from the National Institutes of Health to study neutrophil recruitment during bacterial pneumonia caused by Legionella pneumophila, a common lung infection in humans, which provided 1.2 million dollars in direct costs. This was his first NIH grant which was applied and funded at the first submission. Jey states that it was a pleasant surprise for him that his R01 grant got funded and the news gave him a real boost to continue his research enterprise with a lot of confidence. A Biomedical research grant from the American Lung Association and a career development award (K08 equivalent) from Flight Attendant Medical Research Institute had allowed him to start his work at the Louisiana State University on strong financial footing at the initial stages at LSU. Jey recalls that he wrote 5 fellowships/grants and got all of them funded at the first time. He advises that it is not a good idea for the new investigators to send their grants until they are really ready. Jey states that it is critical for new investigators to write their best possible grants so that reviewers will get a good impression about the investigator. Presently, Jey serves as a member of the Flight Attendant Medical Research Institute (FAMRI) and United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Review Panels. Jey strongly feel that his research on neutrophil recruitment to the lung against bacteria is a double-edged sword: an insufficient neutrophil recruitment can lead to life-threatening lung diseases whereas an extreme accumulation of neutrophils can lead to an excessive lung damage. Therefore, the ideal therapeutic approach targeting the neutrophils would be to attenuate their destructive potential while maintaining their critical role in antibacterial defense, but this is an arduous task. Jey’s overall goal is to understand the molecular and cellular mechanisms responsible for neutrophil recruitment, priming and activation in the lungs. He states that the challenge in the next decade would be to develop novel approaches to keep neutrophils in the lung for defensive functions while modulating their undesirable effects leading to extensive lung damage. Jey is optimistic that he and the other basic/clinical researches will face these enormous challenges effectively and identify new therapeutic targets to modulate neutrophil numbers in the lung.