Biology professor Daniel Pérez is caught in a struggle against nature, constantly fighting to keep mutating diseases at bay.
“I think nature is a wonderful laboratory and always finds ways to make things much worse than humans can ever imagine – like HIV, West Nile, SARS, bird flu and now swine flu,” Pérez said. “It’s all nature working wonders.”
Pérez, who serves as program director of the Prevention and Control of Avian Influenza Coordinated Agricultural Project at the university, is an expert on avian and swine flu. He has researched the influenza virus since coming to the United States from Argentina in 1990 and helped concoct a vaccine for avian flu in 2003. Recently, his focus has shifted to curing and preventing the spread of swine flu.
“I guess this is the ultimate goal of any scientist working in the area of infectious diseases, to be useful to society by seeking alternatives that can relieve the impact of diseases,” Pérez said.
In a recent study published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Pérez worked with a virus similar to swine flu to examine how mutated viruses react with vaccines. His findings will be used as his research team works with the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to develop vaccines for the swine flu.
In 2003, Pérez’s team created a hybrid bird-human flu virus by using “reverse genetics” technology – when researchers begin with an unknown gene and use molecular analysis to determine its function – and infecting ferrets with the virus. After allowing the virus to mutate and spread to healthy ferrets, his team observed how the mutated viruses responded to the vaccination.
Though this research worked exclusively with strains of bird flu, his findings are still relevant to swine flu because both types of influenza involve transmission between people and animals and indicate that, contrary to popular belief, current vaccines won’t be as effective against interspecies-transmitted flu.
Although the recent surge of swine flu infections has caught many off guard, Pérez said he wasn’t surprised by the emergence of a flu outbreak.
“My work, and the same goes to other flu researchers, has taken on added visibility since 1997 when there was the first reported case of [the avian flu] in humans,” Pérez said. “Since then, not only have these incidents occurred very frequently but they also have highlighted the need for the type of work that I do.”
What does interest Pérez is “the time of the year in which this has occurred,” he said, adding it is surprising that swine flu has been spreading even after flu season has come to an end.
Biology professor Siba Samal is confident Pérez has what it takes to combat flu outbreaks.
“He sees the big picture,” Samal said. “He has the knowledge and capacity to coordinate a large scientific group to address health issues of national and international importance.”
Ultimately, despite the serious and often tedious nature of his work, Pérez’s colleagues extol his lighthearted approach to his research.
“He has a great sense of humor,” Samal said. “He provides the staff with their daily booster shot of humor with his ‘joke of the day.'”
Pérez’s job consists of mostly research, though this semester he has six graduate students in his lab. He also teaches one course, “Biology and Epidemiology of Zoonotic Viral Diseases,” every other fall.
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