This year has seen a record number of dengue cases in the U.S. and it might not be a fluke, as climate change expands the areas where the mosquito that transmits the tropical disease can thrive. New measures for treatment and protection are necessary, but there’s something peculiar about the way dengue infects the body that has stumped scientists for decades.That is, until now.
Dr. Leah Katzelnick, Dr. Camila Odio, and Dr. Stephen Whitehead from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) are digging into dengue and coming up with ways to defy it.
For Dr. Steve Holland, the mystery of why some people are more prone to disease is as much a curiosity as it is a calling. Dr. Holland is the scientific director and chief of the immunopathogenesis section at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) where he searches for signs to explain differences in susceptibility to certain infections. In this episode, he discusses how the immune system can thwart its own defenses by producing antibodies that block the chemical signals it needs to put up a fight.
The success of mRNA vaccines against the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 has brought RNA biology into the limelight. Now, with the world's attention, what's next for this biomedical rising star? NIH scientists, Dr. Richard Maraia and Dr. Natasha Caplen, have long recognized the potential of RNA in improving human health. In this episode, they discuss the prospects of RNA biology and how their work could inform the future of RNA as an innovative class of medicine.
In this episode, Dr. Richard Childs, a senior investigator and Clinical Director of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), recounts his experience using the antiviral remdesivir to treat patients with COVID-19 in one of the early hot zones of the pandemic. He led a team sent to care for passengers on the Diamond Princess cruise ship that was held in quarantine in Yokohama, Japan at the start of the outbreak. Since then, remdesivir has continued to gain traction as a possible standard of care. Dr. Matthew Hall, biology group leader at the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), explains the development of the drug and its newfound purpose in the battle against the novel coronavirus.
Perhaps now more than ever, it is undeniable how integral vaccines have become to public health. Vaccines protect us from a whole host of infectious diseases, including chickenpox, measles and the seasonal flu. With a new threat at hand, scientists at the NIH swiftly developed a vaccine candidate against the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. The pre-clinical effort was driven in part by Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett, a viral immunologist and research fellow in the Vaccine Research Center (VRC) of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
Our houses, workplaces, and even the air we breathe are teeming with microbes, some of which can cause severe illness. Dr. Catharine Bosio is an immunologist studying how airborne pathogens infect and alter cells in the lungs. Her work focuses in particular on a bacterium called Francisella tularensis, which causes a life-threatening disease called tularemia and has the unique ability to change how energy-producing mitochondria function in immune cells. Dr. Bosio's experiments with these deadly bacteria could lead to more effective ways to diagnose and treat tularemia and other infectious diseases.
