Recent News

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.

Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC), the Human Vaccines Project and the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) announced this week that VUMC has become the project’s first scientific hub. Incubated by IAVI, the Human Vaccines Project is a new public-private partnership that brings together leading academic research centers, industry, governments and nonprofits to accelerate the development of vaccines and immunotherapies against infectious diseases and cancers by decoding the human immune system.

A group of Taos area students is helping researchers at Vanderbilt University with a bit of medical detective work this summer: tracking down Hantavirus survivors in Northern New Mexico. A severe respiratory illness that can be deadly, Hantavirus directly effects more people in New Mexico than any other state in the U.S. One woman in Taos County was diagnosed with the disease this year.

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.

Researchers at Vanderbilt University, the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and The Scripps Research Institute for the first time have shown how human antibodies can neutralize the Marburg virus, a close cousin to Ebola. Their findings, published this week in two papers in the journal Cell, should speed development of the first effective treatment and vaccine against these often lethal viruses, said James Crowe Jr., M.D., whose team at Vanderbilt isolated and characterized the antibodies.