Emory University HospitalWIKIMEDIA, DANIEL MAYEROn a cloudy afternoon in March, immunologist Rafi Ahmed is at work in the basement of the Rollins Research Center at Emory University in Atlanta, just down the street from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Months earlier, Ahmed had begun studying immune cells in blood collected from four Ebola survivors treated in Emory University Hospital’s Serious Communicable Diseases Unit last year. He and his colleagues last month (March 9) detailed in PNAS a robust immune response driven by the Ebola virus during and after infection. “It’s truly the first look at what’s happening to B and T cell responses during the acute phase of infection,” Ahmed told The Scientist.
“Anything we learn about pathogenesis is very important,” said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) who was not involved in the work. The “phenomenal amount of immune activation” induced by Ebola in these patients means the immune system is engaging with the virus, he added.
When Ahmed first heard that Ebola patients would be treated at Emory last fall, he immediately contacted the clinical team and the CDC to get patient consent and access to some of the samples. “They were going to do the viral load anyway, so I said let’s do some immunology at the same time,” he said.
While news of the first Ebola patients arriving in the U.S. stirred public alarm, the postdocs in ...
