News

An H1N1 vaccine developed at the University of Nebraska Medical Center will enter a definitive round of testing this month, and researchers hope to establish its ability to ward off the virus. Made possible by a licensing deal brokered through UNMC's technology transfer office, UNeMed Corporation, the study will evaluate the vaccine on 30 to 40 pigs. If tests yield results as expected, Prommune, Inc. could begin offering an H1N1 vaccine to hog farmers as early as the end of the year, although full approval from the USDA would likely take another three or four years.

A novel synthetic DNA vaccine can, for the first time, induce protective immunity against the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) coronavirus in animal species, reported researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

Viruses are tiny-merely millionths of a millimeter in diameter-but what they lack in size, they make up in quantity. “If you were to take all the viruses from the planet, and lay them side by side, the length would be 1,000 times the length of the Milky Way,” says David Ussery, who leads the comparative genomics group at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Worldwide, 185 million people have chronic hepatitis C. Since the late 1980s, when scientists discovered the virus that causes the infection, they have struggled to find ways to grow it in human cells in the lab -- an essential part of learning how the virus works and developing new effective treatments. In a study published in Nature on August 12, scientists led by Rockefeller University's Charles M. Rice, the Maurice R. and Corinne P. Greenberg Professor in Virology and head of the Laboratory of Virology and Infectious Disease, report that when they overexpressed a particular gene in human liver cancer cell lines, the virus could easily replicate. This discovery allows study of naturally occurring forms of hepatitis C virus (HCV) in the lab.

People who delay or refuse vaccines for themselves or their children are presenting a growing challenge for countries seeking to close the immunization gap. Globally, 1 in 5 children still do not receive routine life-saving immunizations, and an estimated 1.5 million children still die each year of diseases that could be prevented by vaccines that already exist, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).