From a human health standpoint, we have continuous virus infections. We’re all infected
multiple times in a year and some of these are really serious, and I do think that there’s
going to be new and more dangerous pathogens we continue to run into. From a scientific
standpoint, they’re fascinating because they bring so little with them and then they
highjack us–our cells–to function. And so, when you study them you learn about an
important infection process, but you also learn about how we function
and to me that’s a great synergy.
I think it will. We do think about some of these mosquito-borne illnesses. When West
Nile came in, we worried some about that. There’s been worry in the southern part
about Dengue virus, and actually a newer one to us called Chikungunya virus. I think Zika
will raise awareness partly because if the tie is really proven between microcephaly
and Zika virus, that is obviously truly terrifying. For portions of the U.S. particularly far
north, the mosquitos that bear these don’t really go there very often, but for the southern
part of the U.S. it’s a real risk. And so I think the awareness is going to keep rising.
If you go back to the 1970’s, the Surgeon General of the U.S. thought we would conquer
infectious diseases in his lifetime, and I think the aids epidemic and then these continuing
new emerging diseases are proving that that’s completely wrong. The reality is every virus
does things a little bit differently. And so, understanding the great molecular details
on HIV infection, doesn’t necessarily tell us how exactly how Dengue works or now how
Zika works. And so, you really need to have scientists dissecting the details for every
single one of these pathogens and frankly there’s not that much money for much of
this. If you looked at the Ebola crisis, that was one of the things that came up if you
really look at how much federal funding went in to studying Ebola up until the crisis last year,
wasn’t that much compared to how much money we put into other things.
I’ll become president at the next annual meeting, which will be in June. The society
has about 3,000 members. The annual meeting usually has about 1,600 people attending.
So first it’s an honor, because it was an international election to be chosen. And then
my duties will include things like basically I get to plan the meeting in the terms of
who all the major speakers are, that’s exciting and a little daunting because you want it to be great,
looking at policy and sometimes there are policy issues that come up that
they want the president of ASV to weigh in on. I went to meet with the president of the
American Society for Microbiology recently, and one of the things we’re talking about
is, “How do we get a colloquium up on emerging disease and how do we deal with the Zika virus issues?”
The first thing we started when we got here are working on viruses that are called Hendra
and Nipah virus, and while most people have only heard of Nipah, if you’ve seen the
movie Contagion, Contagion was based on Nipah. So these are biosafety level-four pathogens.
They are called zoonotic, which means they will move from animal into human and there
is no treatment, and mortality rates are reasonably high. So we don’t work with the whole virus.
So Kentucky can rest easy, but we work with bits of it to start to understand how different
viral proteins function, what do they interact with, so that you can come up with new therapies
and that work continues in the lab. And then about 10 years ago, we also started working
on a different virus called human metapneumovirus. It was discovered in 2001 from patient samples
for people who had severe respiratory illness, but we didn’t know what caused it. And once
they knew what they were looking for, it turns out it’s a worldwide pathogen… 99% of
us get it by age five and then we keep getting it–probably the second or third cause of
viral pneumonia in children and in the elderly.
So if you look for instance at human metapneumovirus, both a challenge and I think an excitement
for that one, is we’re trying to move into models that look very much like the human
respiratory track, because a lot of your work is done in a cell culture and it’s just
cells on a flat dish, and you can get a lot of information from that, but it doesn’t
look exactly like us. So we’ve been moving into models that actually reproduce small
bits of the human respiratory track. There the biggest thing is that they’re again,
challenging to work with and they’re extremely expensive. But if we don’t do that, we always
worry that what you’ve done in a simple model may not really look like it would be
when you or I are infected.
A few years into my lab opening back in 2004, one of my students
discovered a very novel process for activating a protein in Hendra and Nipah virus, and exactly
which cell enzyme was involved and it was completely new. And that’s really exciting
because you suddenly think, “we learned something that no one else knew.” In fact
there’s several groups, medicinal chemistry groups who are using that still to develop
anti-viral inhibiters. And we’ve had continuing, “Ah ha” moments like that. You don’t
have them every week or every month, but they do come, and that’s one of the real excitements.
The other thing to me is actually the people you work with, because science means you’re
continually working with trainees of the postdoc, graduate, and undergraduate level. And sometimes
for them watching their experience, their growth, is to me also an “Ah ha” moment.
Because you can take someone who really wasn’t a scientist and was kind of shy and suddenly
you realize over the last three or four years, they’ve matured into somebody who’s going
to change the world.
So I’m very fortunate I’m now training my 17th Ph.D. student.
I’ve worked with lots of undergrads. I love them. They’re doing science because they
love it, and to me that’s really, really wonderful. You know, when I first came to
Lexington to interview I knew nothing about this university, and now 15 years later it’s
not that I haven’t been approached–I have–but I’m so happy here I would not want to leave
because I love all those bits about it.