SOTY Awards 2006    Douglas D. Bannerman


It's a great honor. I've been with USDA ARS about five years. And it was such a shock when I got the
phone call. It's just been really great. I've been doing a lot of research the past few years. It's been really
exciting and it's really nice to get recognition for it. 

You know truly it's a collaborative research I think in ARS your doing experiments multidisciplinary
whether it's infectious diseases or it basic mammary gland physiology, genomics,  proteomics. It's so
technical these days and you need to collaborate and at ARS we've got fantastic resources we have
experts in all types of fields in all types of different disciplines both here at Beltsville and at other ARS
sites across the country. 

My background is mostly on the human medical side with inflammation, infectious disease research
and I thought it would be very interesting to try to apply some of the research that I was doing to the
cow, to the bovine. 

What they said to me is, we've got a world expert here on mastitis we'll train you on the cow you bring
your expertise in immunology and inflammation to us and it'll work. And that's what we did and its
worked out fantastic. 

Mastitis is basically just an inflammation of a mammary gland but now greater than 90% of the cases
of mastitis are caused by bacterial infections of the udder. And when you are thinking about the major
problems of mastitis you are talking about economic losses due to decreased milk production,
decreased milk quality, you've got veterinary animal care services, you've got treatment services,
economically it's a very devastating disease. 

So our goal is two prongs, one is to prevent new infections and to help the cow clear existing infection
so both prevention and treatment is what we are trying to do. Antibiotics are not that effective today in
clearing many of the most problematic infections. And so we need new interventions. There are certain
bacterial infections that the cow can get in it's udder that it can clear readily. But there are also other
bacteria that can set up a chronic infection that can actually persist for the life time of the cow in the
udder. And, so what we are trying to do is delineate what are the immune responses that occur when
the cow successfully clears the bacteria versus what is happening or not happening when a cow gets
infected by another bacteria and doesn't clear it. 

What we've identified is that in the bacteria that the cow can clear is this massive early inflammatory
response that allows it to get rid of the bacteria. So one of our ideas that we are going forward with is if
we can induce that inflammatory immune response. By using things such as immunomodulators to
recreate what the cow does when it successfully clears the infections perhaps that's going to now allow
the cow to get rid of these other infections which we can't treat readily with antibiotics. Antibiotics in
the food supply are a big public perception issue so things that we can develop to reduce our
dependence on antibiotics is a very good thing especially from the public point of view. 

One of the things we are working with are these organic molecules which are very good for the organic 
industry in that is we give these organic molecules into the gland at dry off and what that does is boost
the immune response and recruits white blood cells that can prevent any infection during the two week
period that they are most at risk after drying off. 

We're also know that there are certain bacterial infections that occur at certain times in lactation
especially right after calving where you can get this exuberant inflammatory responses, an over
inflammatory response. The problem there is it can actually be injurious to the cow you can get damage
to the mammary gland so we are working on another compound called cis urocanic acid a derivative of
a compound that is normally found in human skin. We've shown in some trials with bacterial infections
in cattle that this can actually reduce inflammation.

In the lab, what we are basically doing is we've developed a lot of acids and run a lot of acids that allow
us to measure different types of inflammatory mediators in the cow. We've put together a battery of
tests for some of the most major inflammatory mediators that occur in the cow and we're using those
tests to assay or to describe and characterize different types of inflammatory responses that are either
successful in allowing the cow to clear the infection or that inhibit the ability of the cow to clear the
infection.

I think that one of the keys to our research is that we take such a multifaceted approach. Most people
will tell you that when you do research there's a lot of data, there's a lot of times things just don't work
out. I think one of the successes we've had, we've really had a great team of people here. There are
several mastistis researchers, people involved in mastistis research here and at other locations in USDA
and by working together we've actually taken different approaches and what's been nice about that is
it's allowed us to find a lot different branches that work and to go after it. A lot of things we are
working on are tools that people will be able to use for example a lot of times when cows get certain
types of infection because antibiotics have such a low efficacy in some infections the dairymen just 
cull the cow, they get rid of it from the herd. 

Some of the therapeutics that we are working with such as CD14,  which can enhance the immune
response and allow the cow to readily clear those infections, now instead of culling the animal the dairy
men will have a therapy they can use to treat the cows. 

Our tech transfer office which helps facilitate the transfer of a lot of the technology that we develop has
been great. It's allowed us to work with both domestic and international companies to develop these
things. There's been a couple of patents that have been received for much of the work we are doing
with the mastitis. There's at least three major companies we've worked with on three different products
that have been very interested stuff that we are doing.

A lot of the research that we do, the reason we can do it is because we are ARS because we have these
facilities that other institutions don't have. You have access to large animal facilities to be able to due
infections disease research to be able to do cutting-edge research.  So there is plenty of room there's a
lot to do and then if you get some recognition along the way that's great.