 Emily Simon is our ninth presenter, whose title for treatment thesis is targeting Ebola toxicity. A few years ago, we had a worldwide Ebola outbreak. It started in Western Africa, but it spread across the world, including to the United States. Despite the public health risk that Ebola poses, we have no approved treatments for the disease right now. Ebola disease is caused by the Ebola virus. The virus particularly attacks the cells that make up your blood vessels. These vessels then become leaky and blood spills into the other tissues in your body, usually resulting in a very rapid and gruesome death. To combat Ebola, we can look to the structure of the virus. The Ebola virus is covered in proteins called spikes, shown here as yellow arrows on a purple virus. These spikes, in turn, are coated, shown in pink, using a process called glycosylation. Glycosylation happens all the time in your body, even when you're healthy, but the virus hijacks this process and uses it to add this coating onto the surface of its spikes. This coating, on the surface of the spikes, is actually the part of the virus that does the most damage to your blood vessels. My thesis work asks the question, can I interfere with glycosylation, this coating process, in order to reduce the harmful effects of Ebola on the cells in your body? Glycosylation requires a group of enzymes called galnet transferases in order to work. You have 20 different galnet transferase enzymes in your body. If we could disable all 20 of these enzymes, the virus would no longer be able to use the glycosylation process and its spikes would remain uncoated. However, your body cannot survive if it has no functional glycosylation. We believe we can get around this problem. My preliminary data has shown that the Ebola virus preferentially uses one of these galnet transferase enzymes in order to coat its spikes. Our lab is currently working to identify drugs that will inhibit this single enzyme. We can then more specifically target glycosylation, disabling the parts of it that the virus uses to coat these spikes while leaving the rest of the process intact so your body can function normally. In the future, we hope that we could give this type of a drug to an infected person who has Ebola. Their single galnet transferase enzyme that the Ebola virus is using would no longer function and the virus spikes would remain uncoated. However, they would still have 19 functional enzymes to keep themselves alive. Their blood vessels would now no longer be so damaged by the Ebola spike. And we hope and hypothesize that the patient would have a much better chance of recovery from this horrible disease. Thank you.