‘Potential vaccines’: Sask. research studies bats to prevent next disease outbreak

Researchers at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization (VIDO) are busy trying to safeguard us against the next disease outbreak, and they’re using bats.

Researchers at the Vaccine and Infectious Diseases Organization (VIDO) are using bats to try and prevent disease.

Scientists have long been using animals as inspiration to fight disease, antibiotics from bacteria, or infection fighting immune molecules studied in fruit flies.

“Our goal is to understand how bats can coexist with these viruses,” said Arinjay Banerjee, principal scientist at VIDO. “Bats don’t get sick like us humans, so we want to identify what is it about the bat immune system and take that knowledge and develop that into therapeutics for humans.”

His team have recently published three papers for journals that Banerjee calls a pandemic playbook.

One looked at the response to the Nipah virus in southeast Asia, and how effective surveillance and warning systems were at mitigating the spread.

Another identified a gene called GBP1 that may help bats mount a faster antibody response than humans, making them able to live with different viruses without adverse effects.

“I think what we’d like to do is identify more genes, we’re not done yet,” said Banerjee. “There’s a whole list of genes we’re looking at, and those studies are going to come out soon. So it’s probably a collection of responses that happen in a living bat that allows it to coexist with these viruses.”

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Evolutionary biologist Dan Riskin says there are a lot of ways bats are different from humans. He says finding the genes that actually matter when it comes to immune response is important.

“We need to be thinking outside of the box, and bats are definitely outside the box,” said Riskin. “And so the fact that this team can look at the DNA of bats for solutions to the human problem is beyond brilliant.”

He says bats have evolved over 50 million years, and there are now 1498 different species of them.

“Understanding the immune systems of bats and understanding the evolution of bats and how they protect themselves is a big solution for understanding how we can protect ourselves,” he said.

With the team’s recent findings, Banerjee says their vision is to develop a treatment or vaccine within the next 15 years.

“The next goal would be to see how we can actually therapeutics that gene for effective function in humans,” said Banerjee. “And I’m not very worried because at VIDO, we do have very good regulatory scientists. They know how to take products into market.”

He says finding the gene in bats is one hurdle, but your body would mount an immediate immune response if introduced to the human body.

“What we could do is modify, make modification in humanized proteins, which can then potentially become therapeutics or even potential vaccines,” said Banerjee.