Uploaded June 2025 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
Larry Borish, MD, Professor of Microbiology
Transcript
I just love the joy of discovery. I love when you set up an experiment at night, you come in in the morning, you break the code, and those rare times when everything works, you know something that nobody else in the world knows, and it's just incredibly exciting. My name is Larry Borish. I'm a professor in the departments of medicine and microbiology, and I study the interaction of the common cold virus with asthma. Something like 80% of all hospital admissions from asthma exacerbations are caused by the common cold virus. And we're just fascinated by trying to figure out what it is about this otherwise fairly innocuous virus that makes asthmatics' lives so miserable. So what we’ve discovered is, it's not the virus itself-it's not the viral infection that's making the asthma so bad, what the virus is doing is revving up the patient's underlying allergies and causing a severe allergic reaction to whatever is in their environment. So it isn't the virus, it's the fact that they have ongoing exposures to grass or ragweed or cat or to whatever. And it's those allergic reactions that are just getting really revved up. And obviously by making that discovery, we recognize that the treatment is going to be treating the underlying allergies.
Larry Borish, MD, Professor of Microbiology
Transcript
I just love the joy of discovery. I love when you set up an experiment at night, you come in in the morning, you break the code, and those rare times when everything works, you know something that nobody else in the world knows, and it's just incredibly exciting. My name is Larry Borish. I'm a professor in the departments of medicine and microbiology, and I study the interaction of the common cold virus with asthma. Something like 80% of all hospital admissions from asthma exacerbations are caused by the common cold virus. And we're just fascinated by trying to figure out what it is about this otherwise fairly innocuous virus that makes asthmatics' lives so miserable. So what we’ve discovered is, it's not the virus itself-it's not the viral infection that's making the asthma so bad, what the virus is doing is revving up the patient's underlying allergies and causing a severe allergic reaction to whatever is in their environment. So it isn't the virus, it's the fact that they have ongoing exposures to grass or ragweed or cat or to whatever. And it's those allergic reactions that are just getting really revved up. And obviously by making that discovery, we recognize that the treatment is going to be treating the underlying allergies.
