Aleksei Lulla

TL;DR: The presented approach for discoveringAlphaviral inhibitors enabled us to identify potential lead structures for the development of alphavirus entry and replication phase inhibitors as well as demonstrated the usefulness of CHIKV replicon and SFV as biosafe surrogate models for anti-CHIKV screening.

TL;DR: Observations strongly indicate that mechanisms of joint pathology induced by CHIKV in mice resemble those in humans and differ from infections caused by other arthritogenic viruses, such as Ross River virus.

TL;DR: It is demonstrated that viperin is a critical antiviral host protein that controls CHIKV infection and provide a preclinical basis for the design of effective control strategies against CHikV and other reemerging arthrogenic alphaviruses.

TL;DR: A novel mechanism for SG disruption is described usingSemliki Forest virus nsP3 sequesters G3BP to inhibit stress granule formation on viral mRNAs and the efficient translation of viral mRNA containing a translation enhancer element assists disruption of SGs in infected cells.

TL;DR: The development and evaluation of novel CHIKV vaccine candidates that were attenuated by deleting a large part of the gene encoding nsP3 or the entire gene encoding 6K and were administered as viral particles or infectious genomes launched by DNA proved to be genetically stable, attenuated, highly immunogenic, and able to confer durable immunity after a single immunization.