Pitting one virus against another

Mount Sinai School of Medicine's Benjamin tenOever has devoted most of his research to developing vaccines for influenza and other RNA viruses. Now, his team has decided to put the influenza virus to work by turning it into a delivery vector containing microRNAs.¹ The goal is to 'infect' host cells with miRNAs that shut down the replication machinery of other viruses.

The group initially set out to answer the basic mechanistic question of whether RNA viruses such as influenza can produce functional miRNAs in the cells they target...