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By Dawn Kawamoto, CNET News.com, June 28, 2007

For David Heckerman, a funny thing happened on the way toward embarking on a biomedical research career: he went to work at Microsoft.

Armed with medical and doctorate degrees from Stanford University, Heckerman has virtually come full circle in the last 15 years. As lead researcher of Microsoft's Machine Learning and Applied Statistics Group, Heckerman has seen technology he helped develop serve as analytical tools in HIV research.

And earlier this month, Microsoft made the technology available to the research community, as open-source code for four analytical software tools to develop a vaccine for the disease.

...

So our tools help answer that question, and the way we're answering that question is, we're looking at how HIV mutates. HIV is a virus that mutates very rapidly; we're looking at how those mutations in HIV correlate with our cellular immune system.

It turns out, we all have different immune systems, and we can quantify that in the lab. You can measure what your immune system is, and then we can take blood from you if you're infected with HIV, sequence that HIV, and then look for correlations between what kind of immune system you can have and what kind of mutations happen in HIV.

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