New research targets how to fight influenza
Radio interview for KPBS midday edition Nov 26, 2013
ALISON ST. JOHN: I am Alison St. John in for Maureen Cavanaugh. The top story today, we're talking about the flu. A lot of people are still in t-shirts and shorts but in the next couple weeks the flu will be rear its ugly head. We'll talk to a researcher at UC San Diego with a discovery that can change the way that scientists think about therapies for flu. Earlier this morning I talked with Wilma Wooten, talking about how this flu season is should be.
Stuck on flu
UCSD news release Nov 22, 2013
How a sugar-rich mucus barrier traps the virus – and it gets free to infect
Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have shown for the first time how influenza A viruses snip through a protective mucus net to both infect respiratory cells and later cut their way out to infect other cells.
Stopping flu might just be a matter of rock paper scissors
Biomed Central Nov 22, 2013
Want to stop flu? The answer might be blocking their scissors. Research published in BioMed Central’s open access journal Virology Journal shows how flu viruses snip through mucus in your airways and helps explain how flu drugs work.
Expert opinion on Influenza study
San Diego Union Tribune Feb 10, 2013
The study is very significant, said sialic acid experts Miriam Cohen and Pascal Gagneux of UC San Diego. Gagneux authored a 2011 study suggesting that sialic acid played a role in the emergence of forms of malaria that target humans, and in human/chimp speciation. “This is extremely promising work, as it suggests a way that one could produce a drug or design a vaccine, that essentially corners this perpetual moving target so that all that can evolve are noninfectious progeny,” Cohen and Gagneux wrote in an email.
Sexual Selection by Sugar Molecule Helped Determine Human Origins, Researchers Say
Science Daily Oct 11, 2011
Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine say that losing the ability to make a particular kind of sugar molecule boosted disease protection in early hominids, and may have directed the evolutionary emergence of our ancestors, the genus Homo.