Flossie

Flossie Wong Staal was born in China in 1947. She attended UCLA (University of California, Los Ángeles) an after graduation joined the National Cancer Institute. She studied retroviruses( which are a family of viruses that also includes HIV). She clooned the HIV and she is the first person to discover the anatomy of the virus.She joined the university of California at San Diego's AIDS (Acquired immune deficiency syndrome) research team. Presently she is working on how to make a vaccine for HIV.She is trying to obtain a cold virus to imitate HIV and the vaccine could be administrate trough a nose spray. She is also trying to make the outer layer of proteins surrounding HIV larger.Flossie has made a molecule called the octamer that makes a response up to 500 times the normal HIV cell. She is also trying to make a vaccine from the entire virus.A problem is that this would give the person more HIV instead for only the sell of the virus.
Flossie Wong-Staal has done a great deal of research and will continue to do more.

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This is a mail from Flossie Wong Staal:
My laboratory continues to focus on the human retroviruses as model systems to study gene regulation and pathogenesis, and as targets for genetic intervention. Using techniques to detect both protein/protein and RNA/protein interactions between viral and cellular elements, we have uncovered cellular genes that may play important roles in the function of essential viral regulatory proteins (e.g., Tax of HTLV-1 and Rev of HIV). The mechanisms of action of these gene products are under investigation.
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Another major effort of my group is to develop gene therapy for HIV infection. Recent studies of the dynamics of HIV replication in patients under antiviral therapy have reaffirmed the central role of the virus in disease progression and provided a strong rationale for the development of effective, long term antiviral therapy. There are several critical steps in the development of anti-HIV gene therapy: (1) Identification/design of the most potent inhibitory gene(s); (2) Achievement of high level and persistent gene expression in relevant target cells; and (3) Efficient gene transfer into either the mature target cells or hematopoietic progenitor cells. My laboratory has focused on the use of ribozymes (catalytic RNA) to specifically cleave both afferent and efferent viral RNA during the HIV replication cycle. We showed that T-cell lines and primary lymphocytes transduced with retroviral vectors expressing an anti-HIV hairpin ribozyme from a Pol III promoter were resistant to exogenous infection with diverse strains of HIV-1. Furthermore, macrophages derived from primary CD34+ hematopoietic stem/progenitor cells were also resistant to challenge with a macrophage tropic strain of HIV-1. We also developed combinatorial vectors to minimize the chance of viral resistance as well as to increase anti-viral potency.
A clinical trial to test the safety and feasibility of this therapy in patients has begun. Currently, we are developing HIV-based gene delivery vectors to specifically target human CD4+ cells or quiescent, primitive hematopoietic stem cells.


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Flossie Wong-Staal

Flossie Wong-Staal is one of the world's foremost authorities in the field of virology, the study of viruses, and is one of America's pioneering researchers of AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome). Wong-Staal has continued her AIDS research, working specifically in gene therapy, one of the most technologically sophisticated areas in medical research. In 1990 she was listed by the Institute for Scientific Information as the top woman scientist of the past decade and the fourth-ranking scientist under age 45.
Wong-Staal was an excellent student and did especially well in science and math As she excelled in school, Wong-Staal was encouraged to study science further. At first, she was not that interested in it, but the deeper she got into the field. Wong-Staal immigrated to the United States to study at the University of California at Los Angeles. . Beetwen 1965 and 1970 she married (she has since divorced). In the early 1970s, having completed her schooling, Wong-Staal took a position with the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, where she worked in the field of retroviruses with the prominent researcher Robert Gallo, credited as in 1983 Wong Staal and Gallo discovered HIV simultaneously with a French researcher. Wong-Staal was instrumental in this very important work; she was specifically responsible for the first cloning of HIV in 1985. In 1990 Wong-Staal left the National Cancer Institute to become the Florence Riford Chair in AIDS Research at the University of California at San Diego. Wong-Staal and her staff at UCSD, in collaboration with five other research institutions across the United States This is just one of the many areas being researched around the world in an all-out effort to stop the spread of this global epidemic

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