回复：迷迷糊糊的疱疹系列研究----先从感叹开始
不是一个太好的消息。 五月十一日， 洛杉矶时报登载了最新的库伦教授的采访， 他说他的实验还没有接近临床试验， 意味着还不能在人体身上实验。 真让人扫兴啊。 难过！！
迷糊
Professor Cullen was interviewed by the Los Angeles Times about his HSV-1 research
By Alexia Elejalde-Ruiz, Tribune Newspapers May 11, 2011, 1:59 p.m.
For such a ubiquitous plague, cold sores can be mighty shaming.
In addition to the indignity of wearing a bulging, weepy blister on your lip, sufferers also must contend with the stigma of its source: HSV-1, a type of herpes simplex virus.
But unlike HSV-2, the virus that usually causes genital herpes, cold sores are not usually sexually transmitted (though they can be). Most people get infected with HSV-1 as kids, from kissy adults.
"It is one of the most common viral infections, and yet you're a pariah," said Dr. Adam Friedman, director of dermatologic research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University in New York. "People look at you like you're a leper."
About 70 percent of Americans are infected with HSV-1, but just a third of those infected have cold sore outbreaks, said Bryan Cullen, professor in the department of molecular genetics and microbiology at Duke University Medical Center. Genetics likely separates the lucky from the unlucky, he said.
The hardy virus, which stays in your body your whole life, survives by moving up the sensory nerves after initial infection and vacationing in nerve bundles, where immune cells can't find and destroy it. Triggers such as stress, fatigue, sun exposure, picking at your lip or having a cold or the flu can reactivate some infected cells, which travel back to the initial infection site to cause a new outbreak.
There is no cure. Cullen and fellow researchers hope to find a way to disrupt the processes that keep the virus latent, so that they can coax it out of hiding all at once and ambush it with medication. But they're not close to clinical trials, Cullen said.
HSV-1 has been implicated in a number of diseases, including Alzheimer's, though that link is disputed. Though there are rare cases of severe complications from HSV-1 — such as when the virus spreads to the brain in immunocompromised people, causing death or neurological damage — for the most part "the worst part about (HSV-1) is probably the social stigma," Friedman said.
