Professor
Instituto de Biología Molecular y Celular de Rosario (IBR), Argentina
Disclosure(s): No financial relationships to disclose
Alejandro Vila is Full Professor of Biophysics at the University of Rosario (UNR) and Senior Researcher of the Argentinean National Council of Scientific and Technological Research (CONICET). He is Group Leader at the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology (IBR) of Rosario.
His research has been supported by National and Foreign institutions such as CONICET, Antorchas Foundation, the National Agency for Scientific and Technological Promotion (ANPCyT), the American Chemical Society, the Third World Academy of Sciences, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (USA) and the National Institutes of Health (USA).
Over the course of his career, he has published more than 150 papers in leading international scientific journals such as Nature Chemical Biology, Nature Communications, PNAS, EMBO Journal, JACS, Angewandte Chemie, etc. with more than 7700 citations (h-index: 52 -Google Scholar- february 2023). His lab elucidated the determinants of substrate recognition and catalytic mechanism of metallo-β-lactamases, not only in vitro, but also identifying the active species of these enzymes in the bacterial periplasm. These contributions allowed demonstrating that this family of enzymes has a common reaction mechanism, despite a large structural diversity. Based on this, he has designed mechanistic-inspired inhibitors with a potent bactericidal action.
His group has used metallo-β-lactamases as a model system to study protein evolution, having identified the biochemical and biophysical aspects that allow these enzymes to improve their activity and stability in the bacterial cell.
He reported that NDM-1, the metallo-β-lactamase of widest and largest clinical impact, is a membrane-bound protein, which allows it to resist the immune system's response during the infectious process, and allows protein transfer through vesicles, which has led him to postulate a new paradigm in the dissemination of antibiotic resistance in which the transfer of genetic material would be coupled to the transfer of proteins as resistance elements.