Jorge Antonio Benitez, Ph.D.

Biography

Dr. Benitez graduated from the University of Havana School of Biochemistry and Pharmacy and obtained his Ph.D. in microbial genetics and biochemistry at the National Center for Scientific Research in Havana, Cuba. He received further postdoctoral training at the Institute of Biochemistry and Biophysics of the Polish Academy of Sciences and later at the Institute for Microbiology of the University of Dusseldorf (Dusseldorf, Germany) supported by the prestigious Alexander von Humboldt Foundation postdoctoral research fellowship program. Throughout his career Dr. Benitez's research has focused on the physiology and genetics of bacteria and yeast authoring and co-authoring over sixty scientific articles in the field. As director of the Genetics Group at the National Center for Scientific Research he developed a clinically safe, highly immunogenic and protective live genetically-attenuated cholera vaccine that has been subsequently tested for efficacy in South America and Africa. Since 2001, his research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Benitez has served as a permanent member of the National Institutes of Health Center for Scientific Review Host Interaction with Bacterial Pathogens study section and as editorial board member of the journals Infection and Immunity (ASM Press) and Current Immunology Reviews (Bentham Science Publishers). He has taught microbiology, microbial genetics and molecular biology at the University of Havana, California State University and Morehouse School of Medicine (Atlanta, GA) where he currently holds and adjunct Associate Professor Position. Dr. Benitez is also adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine Microbiology Department.

Current Research

Dr. Benitez' laboratory works on the biology of Vibrio cholerae, a Gram-negative, highly motile bacterium that colonizes the human small bowel and causes the potentially life-threatening watery diarrhea known as cholera. Cholera is a paradigm waterborne disease transmitted by the fecal-oral route. To cause disease, infecting bacteria overcome the gastric acid barrier and colonize the human small bowel where secretion of cholera toxin triggers the rice-watery diarrhea typical of cholera. Late in infection, cholera bacteria down-regulate the expression of virulence factors and activate the production of protease and motility to detach from the intestinal mucosa and return to the aquatic environment in a hyper-infective stage. This transition is mediated by multiple interacting signal transduction pathways and global regulators such as the cAMP receptor protein, the general stress response regulator RpoS, the histone-like nucleoid structuring protein and quorum sensing. The objective of Dr. Benitez' research is to understand the global regulatory mechanisms that control the virulence-to-detachment switch late in infection. To this end, his laboratory combines multiple approaches such as bacterial genetics, functional genomics, and animal models. The ultimate goal of his research is to identify bacterial targets for small molecules capable of inhibiting cholera infection and to develop the corresponding assays suitable for high throughput screening.

Publications