Recent News

James Crowe Jr., M.D., director of the Vanderbilt Vaccine Center, and Anthony Fauci, M.D., director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), recently participated in a U.S. Senate National Institutes of Health (NIH) caucus briefing held in Washington, D.C., by Senate NIH caucus co-chairs Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Dick Durbin (D-IL).

Recently, two Ebola survivors from Nigeria flew to Vanderbilt, not only to share their story of survival, but to provide blood samples for ongoing research in the Vanderbilt Medical Center. Researchers at Vanderbilt are developing antibodies that could help treat people infected with Ebola and protect people at high risk of infection.

Two survivors of a 2014 Ebola outbreak in Nigeria visited Vanderbilt University Medical Center last week to share their experiences and participate in a study aimed at finding ways to treat the often-fatal infection. The survivors are physicians at the First Consultants Medical Center in Lagos, where a Liberian man infected with the Ebola virus was admitted in July 2014. Eleven doctors and other hospital staff who came in contact with the man became infected, and four of them later died.

Researchers are inching closer toward the development of a treatment and cure for dengue fever, which affects an estimated 400 million people each year. Caused by a mosquito-borne virus, dengue fever causes severe, flu-like symptoms, and in particularly bad cases that are caused by repeated infection, the disease can be fatal. In a study published in the journal Science, researchers in the U.S. and Singapore describe the discovery of a potent human antibody that neutralizes dengue type 2, an aggressive version of the virus.