�Scientists at the University of Pittsburgh Center for Vaccine Research have been awarded $3.6 million from the National Institutes of Health to conduct animal studies of vaccines designed to protect against the most common and deadliest strain of avian flu, H5N1. Recent outbreaks of H5N1 have prompted health officials to monish of its continued threat to global health and potential to trigger an avian influenza pandemic.
"Worldwide avian flu control efforts have been mostly successful, but like seasonal influenza, avian influenza changes year to year, creating fresh subtypes and strains that could easily and quickly spread among humans," aforementioned Ted M. Ross, Ph.D., principle investigator of the grant and assistant professor, Center for Vaccine Research, University of Pittsburgh.
Unlike other avian flu vaccines, which ar partially highly-developed from live viruses, the vaccines Dr. Ross and colleagues testament test in non-human order Primates are based on a virus-like molecule, or VLP, that is recognized by the resistant system as a genuine virus just lacks transmissible information to reproduce, fashioning it a potentially safer alternative for a human vaccine. Given the evolving nature of H5N1, the vaccines make been engineered to encode genes for many influenza viral proteins to volunteer enhanced security against possible new strains of the virus.
"VLPs may be advantageous all over other vaccinum strategies because they are easy to develop, produce and fabricate," said Dr. Ross. "Using recombinant technologies, within ten-spot weeks, we could return a vaccinum most effective towards the current circulating strain of virus, devising it a cost-effective countermeasure to the threat of an avian influenza pandemic."
Co-investigators at the University of Pittsburgh include Simon M. Barratt-Boyes, Ph.D., Department of Infectious Diseases and Microbiology; Gerard J. Nau, M.D., Ph.D. and Jodi K. Craigo, Ph.D., Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics; Elodie Ghedin, Ph.D., Department of Medicine; and Clayton A. Wiley, M.D., Department of Pathology.
The Center for Vaccine Research (CVR) at the University of Pittsburgh houses both the Regional Biocontainment Laboratory and the Vaccine Research Laboratory. Researchers at the CVR, directed by Donald S. Burke, M.D., dean of the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health and UPMC Jonas Salk Professor of Global Health, develop new methods and strategies to prevent and treat infectious diseases, potentially improving and protecting worldwide health.
University of Pittsburgh Medical Center
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