A 'Trojan Horse' virus that spreads healing

Yue-Wern Huang's latest research involves creating a kind of Trojan Horse. But unlike the mythical gift from the Greeks or the more contemporary computer virus that bears the name, Huang's is designed to sneak good stuff into a bad place.

Huang, an associate professor of biological sciences at S&T, is building tiny vessels of cell-penetrating proteins that could possibly transport a cargo of quantum dots, along with proteins, medicine or DNA, into a malignant or otherwise infected cell and release the healing cargo -- medicine or some therapeutic agent of the future -- into the microscopic "Troy": the walled city of a cell.

The vessel -- Huang's Trojan Horse -- is a nontoxic protein transduction domain, or PTD,which is derived from a virus that can penetrate the cellular membrane.

This latest work is funded through a $225,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.