The Federal Drug Administration of the US approves new drugs solely on the basis of safety and effectiveness, with no value assessment. Pharmaceutical companies may set their drug prices based mainly on what the market will bear. Nevertheless, the announcement that Gilead Sciences would price their just-approved, anti-hepatitis C virus (HCV) drug sofosbuvir ...

On episode #286 of the science show This Week in Virology, Vincent and Alan meet up with Julie and Paul at the General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in Boston, to talk about their work on the pathogenesis of poliovirus and measles virus. You can find TWiV #286 at ...

Evolution proceeds by selection of mutants that arise by error-prone duplication of nucleic acid genomes. It is believed that mutations that are selected in a gene are dependent on those that have preceded them, an effect known as epistasis. Analysis of a sequence of changes in the influenza virus nucleoprotein ...

Ian Lipkin, Columbia University, New York, and Lyle Petersen, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Fort Collins, Colorado, discuss recently emerged pathogens, and how to prepare should their range expand. When asked if MERS-coronavirus would cause the next pandemic, Ian Lipkin responded 'I don't have a crystal ball'. Recorded at the Annual ...

This article was written for extra credit by a student in my recently concluded virology course. by Nayan Lamba A recent study by scientists at the Ludwig Center for Cancer Immunotherapy offers a new, multifaceted therapy for destroying tumors. A team of researchers led by Dmitriy Zamarin combined checkpoint blockade, a ...