The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is issuing a call to arms to scientists across the country. The target: deadly pathogens, particularly RNA viruses such as SARS and influenza that mutate so quickly, thus, regularly frustrating our immune systems and feeble vaccine attempts. Some viruses are also dramatically altered by recombination during reproduction.
The March 16 "Controlling Pathogen Evolution" workshop will be hosted in Arlington, Va., to explore how computational models can be used to predict how individual pathogens evolve. Darpa officials believe it is possible to force pathogens into an "evolutionary trap" to prevent mutation into deadly strains.
Darpa is recruiting experts in infectious disease, epitope prediction, vaccinology, mathematical modeling, protein structure, pathogen evolution, drug design and animal modeling. Epitopes are sites on a pathogen's genetic sequencing that are recognizable to the immune system.
Pathogen evolution research has been growing in recent years due to fears of bioterrorism following the 2001 anthrax attacks as well as the success of genome sequencing in human and non-human organisms. Scientists have a long list of questions about pathogen evolution, including how pathogens jump from one species to another as in the case in SARS and avian flu, how they escape primary and secondary immune responses, and how to develop vaccines that eliminate the advantages gained by pathogens during mutation.
The list of attendees who have registered so far includes CalTech, Biological Mimetics Inc., La Jolla Institute for Allergy & Immunology, Luna Innovations, Midwest Research Institute, Stanford University, and the law firm McKenna, Long & Aldridge.
-- Catherine MacRae Hockmuth
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