MOLECULAR VIROLOGY
Viral diseases continue to pose a
serious threat to human health and are a major challenge to
public health and prosperity across the globe. The extensive
efforts of the global molecular virologists are being focused to
understand the molecular biology of viruses and the mechanisms
by which they cause diseases.
The mission of
CAMB,s Virology Group is
to conduct fundamental research on broad range of viruses and
viral diseases to mitigate the emerging viral infections and
future severe epidemics and
pandemics.
Passionate researchers of
CAMB,s Virology Group are
committed to develop a deeper insight into
virus-host interactions, immune
response to virus infection, virus pathogenesis, viral
epidemiology, gene expression studies, anti-viral therapeutics
and development of diagnostic assays for the detection of
different viral infections.
The traditional focus of our
group has been wide spectrum of viruses but currently our
efforts are concentrated principally on hepatitis C virus
because of its significant high bioburden all across Pakistan.
Based on the fact, that host
genetic diversity is believed to contribute to the spectrum of
clinical and therapeutic outcome in HCV infection, we are
studying the gene expression of SOCS1 and SOCS3 in patients
treated with different combinations of direct-acting anti-viral
drugs. The unique feature of this study is
breadth of expertise ranging from PCR, SDS-PAGE, western blot,
and mammalian expression system (Huh-7, Hela cell lines) to
sequencing.
For the first time we have developed in-house diagnostic assays
for detection of HCV infection and currently our group are
working to develop in-house diagnostic assays for the detection
of Dengue virus, Human papillomavirus (HPV) and Herpes simplex
virus (HSV)