Date: November 28, 2011 By:
Microsoft Research and the Ragon Institute have collaborated on a new way to fight HIV. Microsoft researcher David Heckerman catalogs fragments of HIV that are vulnerable to attack by the immune system. The amount of data generated is enormous, but by using thousands of Microsoft machines working in parallel, researchers are able to make computations in a matter of hours that would take years on a single computer.
“When we first met Bruce, he had a very tricky problem to analyze,” remembers David Heckerman. “He had this great data set but he didn’t know how to analyze it. We happened to have just the right algorithm for it and this large bank of computers at Microsoft that could do this massive amount of computation. He gave us the problem on Friday. On Monday, we had a completed analysis for him.”
In this video, Dr. Bruce Walker and David Heckerman, Distinguished Scientist, Microsoft Research, explain that as our immune system tries to block HIV, the virus mutates to evade the immune system but why there is reason for optimism.
Learn more at Microsoft Research
Their findings, to be published in Cell next month, reveal how the virus manipulates immune system processes to avoid destruction by natural killer (NK) cells, a type of white blood cell that is crucial for fighting viral infections.
The lab of the Ragon Institute faculty member Hernandez Moura Silva, PhD, recently published a review in Science Immunology regarding resident tissue macrophages (RTMs), shedding light on their multifaceted roles in organ health.
After three years off due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Ragon-MIT course HST.434 returned this January to provide 24 students a once in a lifetime learning experience