Chun-Chieh Hsu, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow Yale University Area of Research: All Cancers Newly emerging viruses—such as West Nile virus (WNV), Chikungunya virus and Zika virus—are a growing public health threat, and there are no vaccines to prevent them or medicines to treat them yet. When a virus is recognized in the body, it activates hundreds of interferon-stimulated genes that promote elimination of infected cells. One of these is viperin, which, in addition broad antiviral activity, has been reported to be up-regulated in certain cancers, suggesting that it may also play an important role in cancer development and may represent a novel anticancer target. However, exactly how viperin functions remains unclear. Therefore, to aid in the development of therapies that could help prevent and treat viral diseases as well as cancer, Dr. Hsu is investigating how viperin affects protein production and identifying the proteins regulated by it, which may reveal how viperin contributes to immune responses. Overall, Hsu’s work could pave the way for future strategies that target viperin and viperin-regulated proteins in order to treat viral diseases and cancers. Projects and Grants Regulation of translation by the interferon-induced antiviral protein viperin Yale University | All Cancers | 2019 | Peter Cresswell, PhD
