Immunology Videos

The vaccine revolution is here. Knowledge is your best defense.

WBZ's Mary Blake has more.

http://www.allergyasthma.org Learn more on how to handle allergy asthma and doctors available to help you here.

http://www.weightlosssurgerychannel.com A new study finds inhaled asthma medications, like Flovent and Symbicort, are only about half as effective when taken by obese patients.

Christine Biron is the chair of the Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at Brown University in Providence, and she focuses her research program on the mechanisms of the innate immune system the body s system of non-specific munitions for fighting off pathogens. Dr. Biron is also a newly elected fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology.When a pathogen gets on or in your body, your innate immune system is on the front lines, working against the pathogen is a non-specific manner. In research, the innate immune system got short shrift for a long time, and only in the last 10 or 20 years has the field picked up momentum. Dr. Biron says back when she was in graduate school the innate immune system wasn t thought to be very cool , but she says the field is fast-moving today, in part because of some major discoveries involving Type-1 interferons, natural killer cells, and an increased appreciation of a wider range of antigen processing cells that link the innate and adaptive immune responses.In this interview, I talked with Dr. Biron about our increasing awareness of the innate immune system, why it s important to bring microbiologists and immunologists together under one big tent, and why it s best that a battle between a virus and a host ends not in victory for one and defeat for the other, but in d tente.

Joseph DeRisi is a Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. His research focuses on two distinct areas: malaria and new viral pathogen discovery. Dr. DeRisi is this year s recipient of the Eli Lilly and Company Research Award, granted in recognition of fundamental research of unusual merit in microbiology or immunology by an individual on the threshold of his or her career.Discovering new viral pathogens seems like exciting work, and DeRisi has lots of ideas for prospecting. In one recent success with their viral microarray, his group recently helped identify the virus responsible for a devastating disease among rare parrots and other birds: proventricular dilatation disease, or PDD, has been recognized for 30 years, but veterinarians didn t know the cause or how to control it. Now that DeRisi s group has pinpointed Avian Bornavirus as the culprit and sequenced its genome, therapies and control measures to help both captive birds and birds in the wild can t be far behind.In this interview, I asked Dr. DeRisi whether he s interested in putting the microarray approach to virus discovery to work in uncovering the causes of some human illnesses, especially those diseases we suspect might be spread by viruses, but for which we ve never found a virus responsible. He has some very interesting ideas for where to start. We also talked about his work on identifying the SARS virus, and a new approach in the ongoing fight against malaria.ID3 Podcast Image Provided by James Gathany Courtesy of the CDC.

Ian Orme is a professor in the Department of Microbiology, Immunology, and Pathology at Colorado State University, and his research focuses on the immune response to tuberculosis (TB) a bacterial disease that most often infects the lungs. He s speaking at the American Society for Microbiology s upcoming meeting on Continuing Undergraduate Education (ASMCUE). In the U.S., TB seems like a thing of the past. Here, public health measures and medical care have all but wiped out the threat from this infection. But worldwide, the WHO says there were 9.2 million new TB cases in 2006 alone, and each person with TB infects an average of 10 to 15 people with the TB bacterium every year. (See the WHO s fact sheet on TB here: http://www.who.int/tb/publications/2008/factsheet_april08.pdf and http://www.who.int/tb/publications/2008/factsheet_april08.pdf. But brace yourself this is some scary stuff.) These are just some of the reasons Dr. Orme is delivering a talked titled Tuberculosis: Why Now Is a Good Time to Leave the Planet at ASMCUE. He admits leaving the planet isn t a practical suggestion, but he wants to raise awareness of the disease and he s not afraid to stir the pot a little. Orme and his group not only study the immune responses to TB bacteria, they re also following a number of different avenues for developing new vaccines and improving the existing vaccine, BCG (bacille Calmette-Gu rin). In this interview, I talked with Dr. Orme about his vaccine work, why he thinks latent TB bacteria aren t really latent, and how he sometimes feels like the wild-haired radical, cat-calling from the corner of the lecture hall.

Ian Orme is a professor in the Department of Microbiology, Immunology, and Pathology at Colorado State University, and his research focuses on the immune response to tuberculosis (TB) a bacterial disease that most often infects the lungs. He s speaking at the American Society for Microbiology s upcoming meeting on Continuing Undergraduate Education (ASMCUE). In the U.S., TB seems like a thing of the past. Here, public health measures and medical care have all but wiped out the threat from this infection. But worldwide, the WHO says there were 9.2 million new TB cases in 2006 alone, and each person with TB infects an average of 10 to 15 people with the TB bacterium every year. (See the WHO s fact sheet on TB here: http://www.who.int/tb/publications/2008/factsheet_april08.pdf and http://www.who.int/tb/publications/2008/factsheet_april08.pdf. But brace yourself this is some scary stuff.) These are just some of the reasons Dr. Orme is delivering a talked titled Tuberculosis: Why Now Is a Good Time to Leave the Planet at ASMCUE. He admits leaving the planet isn t a practical suggestion, but he wants to raise awareness of the disease and he s not afraid to stir the pot a little. Orme and his group not only study the immune responses to TB bacteria, they re also following a number of different avenues for developing new vaccines and improving the existing vaccine, BCG (bacille Calmette-Gu rin). In this interview, I talked with Dr. Orme about his vaccine work, why he thinks latent TB bacteria aren t really latent, and how he sometimes feels like the wild-haired radical, cat-calling from the corner of the lecture hall.

Tony Maurelli is a professor of microbiology and immunology in the F. Edward H bert School of Medicine at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland. Dr. Maurelli s major research interest lies in the genetics of bacterial pathogenesis the genetic nuts and bolts of how bacteria infect humans and make us sick. Dr. Maurelli s work has uncovered antivirulence genes in Shigella flexneri, a major cause of dysentery and food borne illness. This is an interesting concept: antivirulence genes undermine pathogenicity, so they must be broken or dropped from the genome for a bacterium to take good advantage of a host and cause disease. These genes are a hindrance, so to become an effective pathogen, Shigella must stop using them. In this interview, I talked with Dr. Maurelli about antivirulence genes, about whether the naming system for bacteria should be fixed, and about his favorite bacteria.

Stanley Falkow is a professor of Microbiology how bacteria cause infection and disease and over the course of his career he has contributed fundamental discoveries to the field. Falkow received the Lasker prize this year for special achievement in medical science, and the Lasker Foundation calls him one of the great microbe hunters of all time . Molecular techniques (methods of analysis that rely on bacterial DNA) are now widely used for infectious disease diagnosis, thanks in large part to Falkow, who was among the first to apply an understanding of genes and virulence determinants to analyzing patient samples. He has published extensively in areas ranging from antibiotic resistance to food borne illness to microarrays. It is really difficult to compose interview questions for a scientist whose career has been as far-reaching and profoundly significant as Stan Falkow s. Luckily for me, Dr. Falkow is a gracious conversationalist. In this interview, I talked with Dr. Falkow about his prescient concerns about the dangers of using antibiotics as growth promoters in livestock, why Salmonella is so good at making you sick, and why students who are interested in science should follow their passion.