As challenging as the problem has been, researchers in the Viterbi School of Engineering may be turning a corner. With support from a $13.9 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a multi-institutional team of scientists, including Pin Wang of the USC Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, is exploring a completely new way of manipulating the body's natural defense system.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins have discovered how our anti-infection machinery turns itself down and limits the sniffles, congestion and fevers that are a side effect of the campaign against invading viruses. The discovery seems to solve part of the mystery of why the misery of the common cold lasts only so long.

Delaying the use of nevirapine-containing antiretroviral therapy (ART) for at least six months after labor may improve treatment outcomes among HIV-infected women in developing countries who took nevirapine during labor to prevent their babies from becoming infected, suggests a new study in The New England Journal of Medicine.

While there is no cure for lingering viral infections such as HIV and herpes, a recent study at Princeton University suggests it may be possible to deactivate such viruses indefinitely with the flick of a genetic switch.

A gene known to be a major risk factor for Alzheimer's disease puts out the welcome mat for the virus that causes cold sores, allowing the virus to be more active in the brain compared to other forms of the gene. The new findings, published online in the journal Neurobiology of Aging, add some scientific heft to the idea, long suspected by some scientists, that herpes somehow plays a role in bringing about Alzheimer's disease.

Minnesota has recorded its first culture-confirmed case of influenza for the 2006-07 season in a 12-month old child from Hennepin County. The child's illness was caused by the B/Shanghai-like strain of the virus, the Minnesota Department of Health reported today. The child's virus is a good match for this year's vaccine, health officials said.

Scientists at the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS), part of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., and colleagues at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville have succeeded in imaging, in unprecedented detail, the virus that causes influenza.

Getting your nails done is a treat, but it can also be a health hazard. There is a real health risk associated with getting nails done in a salon that does not follow proper sanitary procedures.

Upon entering a cell, a virus often becomes dormant, turning off its genes and laying low until awakened by som e trigger from its environment. When that trigger is pulled, the virus quickly ramps up production of proteins through built-in positive-feedback loops that turn up gene transcription. (

SonicWALL, Inc., a leading provider of network, Web, email security and backup and recovery solutions, has deployed protection against a Trojan horse targeted at users of Skype Chat, the Net telephone provider's instant-messaging tool.

The Flanders Interuniversity Institute for Biotechnology (VIB) and AlgoNomics have joined forces to develop a technology that verifies whether certain proteins induce an immune response in humans. The collaboration between VIB and AlgoNomics has yielded a biological test that supplements the current computer simulations.

Weight determination of individual viruses with a miniature ion trap