Affectionately called “DocStars,” The Cary Council’s Early-Stage Research Grant recipients are leading medical progress forward. Since its founding in 2015, The Cary Council has awarded 24 Early-Stage Research Grants worth $1.2 million. To date, that initial investment has garnered more than $30 million in follow-on funding. David Greenberg, M.D., received the Early-Stage Research Grant from The Cary Council in 2018 for his project addressing the global antibiotic resistance health crisis.
2025 Update from David Greenberg, M.D.
David Greenberg, M.D., is a clinician, researcher, and Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Department of Internal Medicine at UT Southwestern Medical Center,
where he specializes in transplant infectious diseases, antibiotic-resistant infections, and immunocompromised patients. Additionally, he is a member of UT Southwestern’s Division of Infectious Diseases and Geographic medicine, serving as Director of Microbial Genomics, conducting leading edge research on new antibacterial therapies for multidrug-resistant bacteria. Recognizing the importance of his work, in 2018, The Cary Council awarded Dr. Greenberg an Early-Stage Research Grant to support further investigations into antibiotic-resistant infections.
Often, antibiotic-resistant infections occur following the insertion of medical devices into the body, including pacemakers, catheters, dental implants, and artificial joints. Bacteria attach and grow on the surfaces of these foreign objects, where they form large aggregates called biofilms. These biofilms and the infections they cause are difficult to treat with antibiotics alone, requiring patients to undergo surgery to remove the devices. With his research group, Dr. Greenberg has been investigating non-surgical methods for treating biofilms that form on metal implants. Using magnetic fields, similar to those in an MRI machine, his team has determined a way to noninvasively heat the metal surface of the implant, disrupting the biofilm in the process. Notably, this technology could eliminate the need for surgical removal of the implant, as well as subsequent surgeries to insert a new device. Currently, this new approach to treating these infections is in human trials.
As Dr. Greenberg points out, “it’s estimated that by the year 2050, the number of worldwide deaths due to antibiotic resistance will exceed the number of worldwide deaths due to cancer.” Antibiotic resistance undermines modern medicine, Dr. Greenberg explains. Without effective antibiotics, “we couldn’t do many of the things that we do at UT Southwestern or beyond, from organ transplantation to advanced cancer chemotherapy,” he notes. Because bacteria evolve quickly, combating antibiotic resistance is “continuous and everchanging,” and requires researchers to proactively “tackle [the] pathogens that are becoming resistant to the current supply of drugs that we have,” according to Dr. Greenberg. He describes the issue as a “forever problem”–and one whose solutions will require substantial funding. For his reason, he believes that “the funding that The Cary Council provides and philanthropy in a broader sense has actually never been more important.”
Since receiving his award from The Cary Council, Dr. Greenberg has secured $2 million in additional funding for his work. To begin the process of bringing his research group’s technological inventions out of the lab and into clinical settings, Dr. Greenberg founded a biotechnology company with Rajiv Chopra, Ph.D., who previously worked in the Department of Radiology at UT Southwestern. As Dr. Greenberg explains, the nation’s health care systems spend billions of dollars each year treating prosthetic joint infections, a number that his company, Solenic Medical Inc., hopes to decrease.
He is quick to point out, though, that this project was actually born from the lab’s ongoing efforts to create new antibiotics, a completely different area of their lab. “We’ve been fortunate that these early investments–including [the grant] from The Cary Council–have translated into follow-on funding and grants,” said Dr. Greenberg. These early investments have allowed his team to further explore this new area of medicine, providing them with the ability and opportunity to answer new questions that arise around what drives antibiotic resistance.
Meet All of the DocStars
Learn more about all of the researchers who have been awarded The Cary Council’s Early-Stage Research Grant.
