Professor Jane McKeating discusses her work into the Global Infection initiative within the College of Medical and dental Sciences at The University of Birmingham
Title: Global Infection – Professor Jane McKeating
Duration: 1.56 mins
Speaker Names (if given): S1 Professor Jane McKeating – Global Infection
S1 So a virus is something that you can’t see by normal light microscopy, you need very advanced techniques for electron microscopy to see it, but that virus is not able to reproduce itself without a host and us as human beings are made up of lots of different cell types and we are interested in understanding at the molecular level how that virus infects the liver and why does it infect the liver and it doesn’t infect the heart or it doesn’t infect other tissues?
My own lab’s research is a group of really talented basic scientists, both at the post-doctoral and graduate level, and one of the aspects of our work which I think exemplifies what we’re now able to do is that we’ve been working for a small company, iTherX® in California who have developed a new compound that in the laboratory is very effective at preventing Hepatitis C transmission and we are now with the paperwork almost in place for a clinical trial to start this October where we’re going to be giving the drug prior to individuals receiving a new liver transplantation with the goal of preventing infection of that new liver.
The long term big goal would be to contribute in some way to controlling Hepatitis C virus replication in the liver. For most of the major pharmaceutical companies, this is one of their top viruses at the moment that they’re working on; so we may do this directly or indirectly through our published work. We would hope to have a significant impact on the disease burden, globally.
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