Hepatitis C
Background
Hepatitis C virus (HCV) is an RNA virus that infects the liver. There is currently no cure or vaccine for this infection. About 1.5% of the US adult population and 170 million people worldwide are infected with HCV. Current treatment with interferon and ribavirin is only effective in about 50% of patients and this treatment has very unpleasant side effects (Click here to read one woman's blog describing her course of therapy). HCV is spread through contact with HCV+ blood. This can occur through blood transfusions (less of a problem since screening tests were developed in the early 1990s), sharing personal care items (razor, toothbrush) with someone who is infected, sharing needles in drug use, and through sex with a partner who is infected.
Research
I'm a graduate student in a lab that studies HCV and how this virus can escape from our immune system. In most viral infections (like colds and flu) your body is able to recognize the virus and kill it. However HCV is able to survive and cause long term infection because it makes proteins that block your body's antiviral response. The goal of our lab is to understand how this process works so we can make better drugs to treat HCV infection.
One of the reasons there has not been faster progress in developing treatments for HCV is that prior to 2005, no one could culture HCV in a laboratory. This made many types of experiments difficult or impossible to do. Recently, however, a researcher in Japan named Takaji Wakita discovered a strain of the virus which could be grown in culture. This discovery was published right before I started working on HCV. The work I do takes advantage of this tool to study the process of virus entry into cells and the early events in host response to HCV infection.
Publications
These are the papers I have helped with so far:
Saito, et al., 2008
Lau, et al., 2008
Huang, et al., 2007
Johnson, et al., 2007
Saito, et al., 2007
Loo, et al., 2006