Engineering Newsletter

James Hone | Mechanical Engineering

Nearly four decades after it first emerged, AIDS is still a deadly disease, killing more than 25 million people worldwide. More than 2.5 million people a year are newly infected with HIV (human immunodeficiency virus), a virus that almost always leads to AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome).

HIV is one of many diseases, like cancer and other viral and bacterial illnesses, that attacks the immune system, the body’s defense against infection and disease. Even for healthy people with a normal immune system, improving that system would make an individual healthier.

James Hone and his team want to take some key immune-system cells and genetically modify and immunize them outside of the body. A small percentage of people are born with certain genes that make them immune to HIV. Ideally, scientists would harvest their good HIV gene. Then they would modify other people’s genes to look the same way. They would grow a supply of these HIV-resistant genes and put them back into the human body. It’s a potential alternative to shots and traditional vaccinations.

Hone’s goal is to create the basic tools needed to engineer the immune system outside the body, and then to put it back inside the body.

Hone, whose work focuses on carbon nanotubes (CNTs), nanoelectromechnical systems (NEMS) and nanoscale structures with applications in cellular and molecular biology, solar and fuel cells, electronics, and sensors, received his PhD in physics from the University of California, Berkeley. He teaches Carbon Nanotube Science and Technology to graduate students.