Home / Laura S. Levy, PhD
Dr. Levy serves as Professor of Microbiology and Immunology where she studies pathogenic retroviruses, a group of RNA-containing viruses associated with degenerative, proliferative and malignant diseases in humans and other animals.
The research in her laboratory focuses on retroviruses that induce leukemia and lymphoma in susceptible animal hosts. Her long-term research objective has been to perform a molecular dissection of retrovirally-induced lymphoid malignancy to identify and understand the complex cascade of host-pathogen interactions involved in the malignant process.
The primary theme of Dr. Levy's research is retroviral pathogenesis and the induction of malignancy. The early stages of human cancer are very difficult to study, generally because it is difficult or impossible to predict the onset of the malignant process, or to monitor the transformed cells. Viruses that induce tumors in animal model systems offer a unique opportunity to study early events in the malignant process, often because a specific type of tumor is reliably produced. For example,...
Dr. Levy's publications on PubMed