Writing hell is temporarily over

Hello again.  Long time no see.  My apologies again for my absence but I have a good excuse.  I have been working on a paper to submit for publication the past month and it has drained much of my mental capital.  I'm happy to report that the paper was sent to the Journal of Virology on Thursday and will be out of my hands for at least a month as it is reviewed.  I also see this is a great time to briefly explain what I do in the lab.

As mentioned in my last blog entry, I am working on new vaccine approaches to prevent transmission of the Human Cytomegalovirus, or HCMV.  Now, HCMV is something that 90% of the US population is exposed to by the time they hit their mid life crises.  Fortunately, it is very rare for HCMV to cause disease in healthy individuals, which is most of us.  It only really becomes a problem if you were to become immune compromised, or, if you were to happen to get infected while pregnant.  Even then, the virus would do very little to you, but could have devastating affects on the fetus.  In fact, infection of pregnant women is the leading cause of deafness due to infectious disease in the US and the developmental defects due to uteran infection of a fetus costs billions of dollars a year to treat.  Due to the morbidity and cost associated with HCMV infection, the Institutes of Medicine has given developing an HCMV vaccine "priority one" status, its top rating, and many labs over the past 30 years have been working towards a vaccine.  Sadly, none have really worked.

One of the reasons making an HCMV vaccine has been problematic is that the virus only infects humans, making an animal model to study vaccine efficacy unavailable.  No animal model means no pre-testing of vaccine candidates before going into actual humans and getting approval to inject humans with anything with out some sort of safety and efficacy testing in animals is very very difficult.  In lieu of this, I am working with a closely related virus, Rhesus CMV, in the hopes that our studies with it will translate into similar results with HCMV.  While not great, Rhesus monkeys are the closest thing we have to an acceptable animal model.  Fortunately for the monkeys and my own conscious, Rhesus CMV is endemic in the monkey population and, like HCMV, does not result in morbidity in healthy animals.  We are developing a vaccine that makes use of viruses that are unable to grow outside of the lab.  Ideally, this will generate a very strong immune response in the monkeys and prevent them getting the real virus when challenged.  If all goes well, we will then adapt the system for a human vaccine...granted that could be decades away.