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Researcher at UMaine Takes Up Virus Study

Posted on: Friday, 2 December 2005, 12:00 CST

By TESS NACELEWICZ Staff Writer

A University of Maine researcher has won a $600,000 grant to use his knowledge of physics to study how human cells might fight off viruses such as influenza, HIV and Ebola.

Sam Hess, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy, is using a laser-scanning microscope and spectroscopy to study rafts - clusters of cholesterol, fat and protein. Rafts spread across the membrane of a cell much as globules of fat float on the surface of a bowl of chicken soup.

Rafts are thought to perform many useful functions in the cell. But they also somehow help a virus like flu puncture a hole through the cell's protective membrane and infect the cell.

Hess, with the aid of the five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., is studying how rafts make it easier for viruses to invade human cells. An understanding of the process, he said, could help scientists figure out how to interrupt it with a drug.

Hess said his research could apply to common influenza viruses as well as less common but more deadly viruses, such as the Asian bird flu; HIV, the virus that causes AIDS; Ebola; and SARS, severe acute respiratory syndrome.

"If we can figure out why these clusters form, these rafts, we can figure out a way to disrupt them . . . that will destroy the virus' ability to infect," Hess said Thursday.

Many researchers are studying viruses, especially with experts fearing that the bird flu could cause a worldwide pandemic. Hess stands out because he's using his skills as a physicist to do biomedical research.

He said he believes he's the only person using lasers and spectroscopy to look at what's going on in a virus.

Spectroscopy, he said, involves looking at the various colors of light that either are absorbed or emitted from a substance, to understand what it's made of.

In fact, the NIH grant that Hess won is designed for such non- traditional medical research, according to Dr. Joshua Zimmerberg. He is the branch chief of NIH's National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and is helping to guide Hess' research.

"They're rare and they're new," Zimmerberg said of the "career award" Hess received. He said the awards are designed to "encourage people who are well-versed in the physical sciences to take a look at the current problems that face health researchers."

And he said award recipients are chosen on the basis of their research proposals and because of the promise they show as biomedical researchers. "It's a career development award," Zimmerberg said.

Hess, 32, earned his undergraduate degree at Yale University and his doctorate in physics from Cornell University. He did post- doctoral work at NIH.

Hess, who has been teaching and doing research at the University of Maine in Orono since last year, said, "I've always been interested in the questions that biologists and biomedical researchers were asking, but I found my own strengths were with physics and math."

Putting the two together seem to provide unique opportunities, he said.

Hess also is being guided in his research by University of Maine physics professor R. Dean Astumian. Using laser-scanning fluorescence microscopes, Hess is studying how the rafts - and the high concentrations of cholesterol in them - help viral proteins bond to the surface of cells, penetrate and infect them.

Hess said he isn't using an actual virus in the lab. Instead he is using cells that make a viral protein called hemagglutinin, which doesn't have the genetic material that viruses use to infect host cells.

Hemagglutinin is of special interest to Hess. He said a virus uses the protein like a spike to open a hole in the cell so the virus can shoot its genetic material in.

However, removing cholesterol from the cell membrane inhibits hemagglutinin. Hess plans to look at drugs like the cholesterol- fighting statins to see what effect they have on the cholesterol- filled rafts and the affinity viruses have for them.

Staff Writer Tess Nacelewicz can be contacted at 791-6367 or at:

tnacelewicz@pressherald.com

Source: Portland Press Herald

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