Jürgen Bulitta, Ph.D.

Jürgen B. Bulitta, PhD, is a professor in the Department of Pharmacotherapy and Translational Research at the UF College of Pharmacy. He is supported by the University of Florida’s preeminence program in Drug Discovery and Development, and received the Perry E. Foote Eminent Scholar Chair, Endowed Professorship, in 2019. Dr. Bulitta’s research focuses on combating multidrug-resistant bacterial ‘superbugs’ which present one of the three most serious threats to human health.

His mission is to optimize patient therapies and innovative drug development by providing a focal point for translational research in infectious diseases and related areas, and to serve as an internationally-leading, interdisciplinary, collaborative program for translational research.

Dr. Bulitta’s vision is to provide novel solutions and great hope for patients with serious, life-threatening infections by developing new safe and effective therapies. These are informed at the molecular level by an innovative combination of mechanistic, in vitro, animal and quantitative approaches to rationally optimize outcomes in patients. His highly collaborative research program leverages latest pharmacological, microbiological, biochemical and computational approaches. This creates unique translational insights that enable novel therapies and dosing strategies, as well as the design and development of new drugs. We work hard so that we can say “we have an effective therapy for you” when you most need it.

He won 26 peer-reviewed grants (15 as PI) from the NIH, FDA, the Australian equivalents of NIH and NSF, as well as 30 collaborative projects with pharmaceutical industry (total: $35M, 18M active). Dr. Bulitta published 140 peer-reviewed papers and contributed to over 97 phase I-IV clinical trials. He reviewed for several NIH study sections and received 23 awards since 1998. These include the Giorgio Segré Prize 2010 for distinct contributions in the field of pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics by the European Federation for Pharmaceutical Sciences (EUFEPS) and the 2012 ASCEPT Denis Wade Johnson & Johnson New Investigators Award. Dr. Bulitta created the Translational Clinical Pharmacology course (PHA6133). He is the creator and developed of the SADAPT-TRAN package that greatly facilitates the development of systems pharmacology models in the S-ADAPT population modeling package.

Dr. Bulitta’s research focuses on multidrug-resistant bacterial ‘superbugs’ which present one of the three most serious threats to human health. His research goals are to develop and rationally optimize novel antibiotic combination dosing strategies and to discover and develop new antibiotics based on mechanistic biological insights which his group generated. Dr. Bulitta’s research focuses on Acinetobacter baumannii, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Klebsiella pneumoniae, and Escherichia coli. His group is systematically identifying unique penicillin-binding protein (PBP) receptor occupancy patterns using double beta-lactam antibiotic combinations to synergistically kill these ‘superbugs’. Moreover, Dr. Bulitta is developing novel strategies to eradicate non-replicating bacterial persisters via available antibiotics and has pioneered the field of mechanism-based and Quantitative and Systems Pharmacology modeling of antibiotics. Dr. Bulitta’s group leverages latest dynamic in vitro infection models, biochemical and molecular studies, LC-MS/MS bioanalysis, as well as latest pharmacometrics methodology to develop and rationally optimize efficacious antibiotic combinations. His highly collaborative research involves an international network of academic, clinical and industry scientists. Dr. Bulitta is collaborating with experts in animal infection models, antibiotic drug development, bacterial resistance mechanisms and genetics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, lipidomics, medicinal chemistry, flow cytometry, advanced imaging techniques, and clinical infectious diseases.

• Acinetobacter baumannii
• Aminoglycosides
• Antibiotics
• Beta-lactamase inhibitors
• Beta-lactams
• Eradication of non-replicating bacterial persisters
• Escherichia coli
• Klebsiella pneumoniae
• Mechanism-based mathematical modeling
• Mechanisms of antibiotic action and synergy
• Multidrug-resistant bacterial ‘superbugs’ and their resistance mechanisms
• Omics techniques and single cell analyses
• Penicillin-binding protein (PBP) occupancy patterns
• Pharmacodynamics
• Polymyxins
• Population pharmacokinetics
• Pseudomonas aeruginosa
• Quantitative and Systems Pharmacology modeling
• Rationally optimizing anti-infective combination dosing strategies
• Staphylococcus aureus
• Toxicodynamics
• Translational drug development