Imagine being the go-to lab in the nation when a deadly virus rears its head.
Imagine saving countless lives by creating a seed virus that grows rapidly in fertilized eggs from which pharmaceutical companies can make billions of doses of the vaccine.
Imagine receiving no compensation for all that hard work.
Doris Bucher smiles and says the college did get acknowledged by having its seed virus named NYMC X-179A.
The NYMC stands for New York Medical College.
For all those long days and endless weeks in the lab, the big payoff is pride and being able to leverage the results into funding.
“They use our virus because it grew better,” Bucher said.
“The reason we don”™t receive royalties is because the approach to making the high yield reassortants was not patented,” Bucher said.
Bucher is associate professor of microbiology and immunology and heads the team of researchers who are at the vanguard fighting swine and other flus that could prove deadly if left unchecked.
As the controversy continues over whether or not to get a flu shot, Bucher said she is going to get vaccinated and said the shots ”“ seasonal and swine flu ”“ are worth it for businesses large and small. “It”™s a good investment for every business to provide the vaccine (to its employees.) It”™s cost effective and will cut (down) on absenteeism.”
Bucher has been with the medical college for 20 years, having come from Mount Sinai Medical School. At Mount Sinai, she met Edwin D. Kilbourne, an infectious disease specialist who worked on the first swine flu virus in 1976. After being with New York Medical College for five years, Kilbourne was invited to join the department. He is now a professor emeritus with the college.
Bucher received her Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley.
“I left Berkeley and did a post-doc at UCLA, developing ways of purifying proteins and membranes. And then I applied that to flus. And then Ed Kilbourne and I started working on purifying proteins in vaccines for flus.”
The work is a far cry from the work she did on the farm she grew up on in Amish Country in Pennsylvania.
Today she works with several researchers on the Valhalla campus of the college. The affable researcher refers to her cluttered office in the Basic Sciences Building as the lair of a mad scientist.
She keeps an eye on influenza outbreaks by monitoring what”™s occurring in the Southern Hemisphere, which just emerged from its winter season and where “Australia had a real bad time of it.”
A report in the New England Journal of Medicine found 722 people ended up in intensive care units in Australia and New Zealand.
“Normally, we would only be seeing maybe 30 to 40 patients admitted to intensive care with the flu, it is actually very rare to come to intensive care because of the flu,” Ian Seppelt, a researcher at the Sydney Medical School, told Reuters.
When a case of swine flu popped up earlier this year in California, the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent a vial of H1N1 which had been isolated in eggs to Bucher.
One she received it, it was long weeks of hard work.
Since the virus doesn”™t grow in eggs, Bucher and her team have to make it do so.
Basically, “we want a virus that looks like what”™s out there now but grows well,” Bucher said.
“Usually what the manufacturers want is six genes from the old virus and two genes from the new one. There are other combinations; all that it matters is that it grows really well.”
The seed is in turn sent to the CDC where it is re-evaluated before it is sent to the manufacturer.
Next up for Bucher is work on H3N2 for next year”™s flu season below the equator.
