Dr. Burns has three major emphases in her current research: cystic fibrosis microbiology, antibiotic efflux in Burkholderia cepacia, and pathogenesis of cystic fibrosis lung infections. The first of these is multifaceted: Dr. Burns is the director of the clinical CF laboratory at Children's Hospital and Medical Center (CHMC), which serves as the core laboratory for the CF Therapeutic Development Network (TDN) and performs quantitative sputum cultures and MIC determinations for both clinical and research specimens from CF patients. She works very closely with the TDN coordinating center on the development and performance of clinical trials in CF. A second major focus of her research is drug efflux as an inducible mechanism of multiple antibiotic resistance in B. cepacia. An efflux operon has been cloned and sequenced and the regulation of the operon and its potential inducibility by conditions present in the lungs of patients with CF is currently being investigated. The third project ongoing in Dr. Burns' laboratory is the investigation of the pathogenesis of pulmonary infections in CF. Both an animal model and tissue culture cells are being used in these studies of inflammation and invasion. A project in her laboratory that is part of a CF Foundation-funded program project grant in the Department of Medicine (Project Director: Samuel I. Miller) seeks to use antibodies in serum from young patients with CF to identify immunoreactive proteins that may be useful targets for vaccine development and antimicrobial therapy. .

PUBLICATIONS

Saiman L, Burns JL, Larone D, Chen Y, Garber E, Whittier S. Evaluation of MicroScan Autoscan for identification of Pseudomonas aeruginosa isolates from cystic fibrosis patients. J Clin Microbiol 41:492-4, 2003.

Tomich M, Griffith A, Herfst CA, Burns JL, Mohr CD. Attenuated virulence of a Burkholderia cepacia type III secretion mutant in a murine model of infection. Infect Immun 71:1405-15, 2003.

Aitken ML, Tonelli MR, Pier MV, Burns JL, Emerson JC, Goss CH, McNamara SC, Gibson RL. Analysis of sequential aliquots of hypertonic saline induced sputum from stable patients with cystic fibrosis. Chest Mar 123:792-9, 2003.

Smith AL, Fiel SB, Mayer-Hamblett N, Ramsey B, Burns JL. Susceptibility testing of Pseudomonas aeruginosa isolates and clinical response to parenteral antibiotic administration: lack of association in cystic fibrosis. Chest 123:1495-1502, 2003.