"My name is Dr. Brenna Hill and we're in the Vaccine Research Center in the Human Immunology
Section of the building.
I look at immune responses after vaccinations against HIV.
My great, great grandfather back in Ireland taught science so it's kind of been in the
family but I'm the first one in the family to actually get into science.
When I was in roughly third grade, we used to have news reels and in 1983, they were
announcing a new disease that was affecting a population in San Francisco.
speaker 2: At first it seemed to strike only one segment of the population.
Now Barry Peterson tells us this is no longer the case.
speaker 3: There is a one in five chance a victim will die within the first year of the
illness.
A disease experts are now calling a national epidemic.
speaker 1: And it was really interesting because it was a viral disease where the virus knew
to attack the immune system to keep itself alive and it just absolutely fascinated me
and ever since then I just kind of got into doing science and biology and anything that
was going on for treatments.
I e-mailed a particular lab that was doing HIV research.
That was really fascinating.
I e-mailed, said I was interested in doing that and they took me on and I've been with
them for the past 15 years.
We are working towards a goal.
We're looking, we're working towards getting a vaccine to HIV and HIV is a very complex
virus.
It likes to mutate itself to evade the immune system as much as possible but the biggest
thing is to determine if the vaccines that we have out there now are going to be even
helpful.
It is baby steps.
And so I usually get samples from the patients who either have the disease or they were a
volunteer in our vaccine trials and we look at the immune response that happens during
the disease or after the vaccine response and decide is it the kind of immune response
that could be helpful?
So I do a lot of work in what is known as flow cytometry where we take immune cells
and we label them with fluorescent antibodies.
And then we look at what each one of them does so you can see the spray of cells right
here which is showing that those cells are actually responding to the antigens of the
vaccine and it's showing that these cells are actually doing some good work.
So we can look at both blood, lymph nodes and every different kind of tissues in the
human body.
You've got a 96 well plate and your samples are in there stained and ready to go.
And then after it picks up the sample, it injects it into this device which then moves
it into the larger device inside our lasers that are shooting at each individual cell
and looking at the fluorescence of each individual cell.
And that is being translated and then recorded by the software.
Everybody here at least in this lab and in this building, we work with each other.
So what did you guys do this weekend?
We're constantly like talking to each other, sharing ideas.
And if we don't have the expertise we will reach out to anybody else at the NIH.
We work so closely together and we do a lot of hard work.
The technology that we're developing is helping us get faster and faster coming to a vaccine
goal.
I would say we're about half way there and hopefully in the next 15 years we have something
that's even better.
Just don't give us.
If it's, if this is something that you love, just keep going with it.
It's, I love it everyday.
I've been doing it for a good 17 years and I still love coming in every day, doing stuff
at the bench, getting the results and seeing what happens."