Nicole Baumgarth: Tackling flu from a B cell angle

Like the innate antibodies she studies , Nicole Baumgarth acts fast in the face of adversity. When she wasn't allowed to enroll in the African livestock program that she had her heart set on in college, Baumgarth switched to mice. When Reagan was elected, she opted for the post-doc in Austra-lia. When a car hit her bicycle soon after moving to the US for a second post-doc, she didn't head home defeated. Alone in the hospital with a five-part fracture in her left leg, she had no one to call save one former lab mate. Although the injury has left her limping 11 years and two surgeries later, she hasn't missed a step. Baumgarth came to California by way of Germany, the UK, and Australia. It was in Brisbane that she first got her hands on influenza , a virus of which she admiringly says elicits a nearly perfect immune response. In 1996 she moved to Stanford to work with Leonore Her-zenberg on B cell responses to influenza (1). Now an associate professor at the University of California, Davis, Baumgarth finds herself back in a veterinary school environment. There, she takes a nontraditional approach to looking at how the body protects itself from various pathogens that plague society today. Besides influenza, that list includes Lyme disease, malaria, HPV, and HIV (2). She puts B cells above all else academic, focusing on the innate regulation of antibody production in response to infection (3–6). With fl u season upon us, I thought I might solicit a little free advice. Do you, an expert in infl uenza, get the fl u shot? I get the shot now that I have two little kids. Before I had kids, I didn't do it. I thought, " I'm a healthy, middle-aged person, I'm not going to die from the fl u. " But now I'm more worried about giving it to my kids. So you think fl u vaccines work? When the vaccine works, it works great. Last year, though, it didn't work because it wasn't perfectly matched [to the prevalent virus strain]. How might your research on infl uenza help create a better fl u vaccine? One focus of my lab is to look at the cells that make broadly reactive anti-bodies to all sorts of diff erent pathogens in a nonspecifi c way. We want to see if we can use the properties of …