Nicole Gudleski Awarded the American Heart Association Postdoctoral Fellowship
- Posted on January 06, 2012
Dr. Nicole Gudleski, a postdoctoral fellow in the Shenk laboratory, was awarded the American Heart Association Postdoctoral Fellowship for the project "Probing the surface of HCMV infected cells for biomarkers of pathogenesis". Human cytomegalovirus (HCMV), a herpes virus linked to the development of atherosclerosis, is a major health problem in immunocompromised individuals. HCMV, like all viruses, relies on numerous host cell proteins for its replication. To elucidate cell surface changes induced by HCMV infection, Dr. Gudleski developed a system to temporally and quantitatively study these changes throughout the HCMV life-cycle. Cell-surface proteins comprise more than a third of the human proteome, they are often altered on diseased cells, and they serve as targets for more than two-thirds of existing drugs. Therefore, it is likely that enhanced understanding of the infected cell-surface proteome will generate new insights to viral pathogenesis and lead to novel treatments for HCMV-related disease.