In the second part of this lecture, I will present background material on Leishmania, the intracellular protozoan parasites responsible for severe human pathology in several parts of the world. I will discuss the main disease forms, the history of identification of the causative agent and form of transmission, and recent discoveries that established important concepts in our understanding of this increasingly serious infectious disease.

In this last segment, I describe another gene therapy strategy for HIV in which we propose to develop antibody-like proteins that can be expressed by a patient's B cells and will target the HIV virus for destruction. To achieve this objective, hematopoietic (blood) stem cells must to be targeted with the gene, which will ultimately develop into B cells that express the therapeutic molecule. The ultimate goal is to produce a life-long supply of anti-HIV neutralizing antibodies. In this...

In part 2, I describe the growing health problem that is facing the world with the spread of HIV and the limitations of current drug therapies and vaccine strategies. We need new ideas for tackling this problem. Here and in the next segment, I describe bold strategies of using gene therapy to conquer HIV, The approach that I describe in this segment involves gene therapy to produce short hairpin RNAs (siRNA) that target the destruction of a critical co-receptor of HIV, which the viruses that...

Dr. Elizabeth Barrett-Connor discusses epidemics with students at Montgomery Middle School.

With the emergence of genomic-scale datasets representing all of the genes in the genome, all of the proteins in a cell or tissue, and all of the interactions and signals in an organism, biologists are increasingly faced with the challenge of how to store, integrate, and interrogate this information. How can we effectively mine large-scale datasets to expedite biological discovery, for example in the identification of new targets for anti-parasitic drug and vaccine design? Computational...

With the emergence of genomic-scale datasets representing all of the genes in the genome, all of the proteins in a cell or tissue, and all of the interactions and signals in an organism, biologists are increasingly faced with the challenge of how to store, integrate, and interrogate this information. How can we effectively mine large-scale datasets to expedite biological discovery, for example in the identification of new targets for anti-parasitic drug and vaccine design? Computational...