In the U.S., the smallpox virus is kept at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.
Then, the scientists inject the patients with a modified smallpox virus.
They will organize calculations running on more than 2 million personal computers, each of which will see if potential drugs block proteins that the smallpox virus requires to function.
However, Haseltine says the odds of a medicine working against a bacteria like anthrax or a virus like smallpox are very high after even early-stage tests.
The only thing they need to do is to destroy their stocks of smallpox, and wipe out this virus once and for all.
We do know that when smallpox has been introduced into populations who have not encountered the virus before, such as what happened during the colonization of the U.S., that smallpox had a much higher fatality rate, certainly exceeding 50 percent.
The vaccine was created by taking a glycoprotein antigen from the rabies virus and inserting it into Vaccinia virus, the same one used for smallpox inoculation.
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The firm plans to use some of the smallpox proceeds to help develop its experimental vaccines for West Nile virus and dengue fever.
Twenty years after the global outbreak of AIDS, no one has developed an effective vaccine against the HIV virus, a far more cunning foe than polio, smallpox or measles.
A. Henderson, who led the effort to eradicate smallpox, have pointed out that we can develop new vaccines without the virus.
And a debate is raging as to whether or not to inoculate the public against smallpox or whether the vaccine would prove effective against genetically engineered strains of the virus.
These vaccines resemble those used against smallpox or polio in that they use a piece of the target -- there a virus, here a cancer cell -- to boost the immune systems ability to find and attack those targets.
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