Nifty One Fifty:
Date: Monday, March 1, 2010
Timeframe: 8:00am - 11:00am
The way renowned scientist Alessandro Sette, Ph.D., sees it, the research community is in a -perennial race- to stay one step ahead of infectious microbes. "New infectious agents originate all the time dating back to the plague in the siege of Athens in the 7th Century to the endemic flu in 1918 that killed 20 million people," says Sette, a researcher at the La Jolla Institute for Allergy & Immunology (LIAI) and director of the Institute's Center for Infectious Disease. "For medical science, it's a perennial race between new infectious diseases coming up and society reacting to them, understanding them and ultimately defeating them." In this war against dangerous viruses, Alex is heavily involved on many fronts, one of the most notable being understanding and identifying epitopes, which are key to vaccine development. Alex is regarded as a world authority on epitopes, the sites on a virus that trigger an immune response. He is also the lead scientist on the National Institute of Health's (NIH) Immune Epitope Database, a novel research tool developed by LIAI under a contract with the NIH. The database enables scientists worldwide to share research information on infectious diseases and was created to accelerate vaccine development on a global scale. In his own lab, Alex places particular emphasis on emerging infectious diseases, such as the avian flu, or those involving bioterrorist threats such as the smallpox and arena viruses.
Alex is also a strong proponent of bioinformatics, which holds significant interest in the scientific community because of its potential to move scientific research forward more quickly and at less expense than traditional laboratory testing. Alex uses bioinformatics in his laboratory to predict immune responses to complex pathogens. "With bioinformatics, the computer does the screening based on very complex mathematical algorithms. And it can do it in much less time and at much less expense than doing the testing in the lab," he says. "It's a powerful tool that is emerging as a key asset in the development of diagnostic tools and ultimately vaccines."
