Three interlocking hexagons with a small white triangle in the middle. Hexagons are blue, maroon, and light gray
Fellows

John Alverdy

  • Sarah and Harold Lincoln Thompson Professor Executive Vice Chair, Department of Surgery
    Director, Minimally Invasive Surgery

  • Contact: jalverdy@surgery.bsd.uchicago.edu
    773.702.4876
  • Office Location:
    5841 S. Maryland Ave.
    C5031
    Chicago, IL 60637

Dr. John C. Alverdy is the Sarah and Harold Lincoln Thompson Professor and Executive Vice Chair of the Department of Surgery at the University of Chicago. He is a clinical gastrointestinal surgeon with an active practice that treats patients with complex digestive-related disorders. He has run a continuously funded NIH-funded laboratory that studies the molecular interactions of bacteria and the intestinal mucosa in order to understand how life-threatening infections arise after trauma and major surgery and during critical illness. He has developed several anti-infective polymer-based compounds that can attenuate the virulence of several multi-drug resistant pathogens that cause life-threatening infections in surgical patients and works with the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering to synthesize, refine, and scale the compounds for pre-clinical testing. 

The Alverdy lab seeks to better understand the regulation of virulence expression among potential pathogens through investigating the characteristics of the microbial context, molecular machinery that senses that context, and ultimately the lethal combinations of virulence expression that leads to disease. The majority of the group's work has focused on the sense and response virulence mechanisms of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a well-characterized and clinically important pathogen. The group has shown a remarkable potential for these organisms to respond to host environmental cues related to stress, ischemia, immune activation, and nutrient depletion. With this core model of environmental regulation of virulence expression, the group is pursuing applications in intestinal transplantation, anastomotic and radiation physiology, necrotizing enterocolitis, and ischemia/reperfusion injury. The group is also investigating similar sense and response mechanisms in other clinically important organisms, including Staphylococcus aureus and Candida albicans. Finally, the group is interested in developing virulence-based therapies to prevent virulence activation through modifications in microenvironment of the stressed host such as phosphate repletion and polymer-mediated mucosal replacement therapies.

The ultimate goal of understanding microbial virulence is to provide clinical tools to improve the care of patients. However, the complexity of the host-pathogen interaction and the vast amounts of mechanistic information available constitute a formidable barrier to translational research. Computational agent-based modeling is well-suited to dynamically represent mechanistic detail in a modifiable context to recapitulate cellular behavior at the tissue, organ, and patient levels.