IFI44 and viral infectious disease: Our finding that ECs dramatically upregulate (2.5 to 8.5 log2 fold) the expression of interferon associated proteins like IFIT1, IFI44L, IFI27, IFIT3, IFI6 and IFI44, together with the fact that these interferon associated proteins restrict replication of BBB disrupting viruses [39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49] suggests that ECs prime the PCs to protect against viral infection induced BBB disruption.