IFN-induced double-stranded RNA (dsRNA)-activated protein kinase R (PKR) is an IFN-stimulated gene (Gale and Katze, 1998; Peters et al., 2001; Pindel and Sadler, 2011) and acts as a pathogen recognition receptor (Gilfoy and Mason, 2007) by recognizing dsRNA, a typical by-product of viral infection, for IFN induction. Here, EIF2AK2 is linked to viral infectious disease.