Grant: Project Grant

Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) is the leading cause of hospitalisation of babies in North America. RSV causes infection of the lungs leading to flu-like symptoms, sometimes severe, including cough and pneumonia. There is a vaccine available and the medications available to protect from RSV are very expensive drugs called palivizumab and Nirsevimab, that can only be used to prevent infection. This means that when a patient is suffering from RSV infection there aren't any specific treatments available to treat the infection itself. In summary, we need to learn more about RSV infection so that we can develop new drugs to treat it when preventative drugs like vaccines and antibodies fail to protect us. We are researching the steps that RSV takes to enter and infect lung cells and how it mutates to avoid vaccine immunity. In order for infection to happen the virus must first cross the outer membrane that surrounds the cell, which is called virus entry. We are studying the entry stage of the virus replication cycle so that we can develop the basis of new drugs that block RSV infection from happening. We are also studying how RSV mutates to avoid protective antobodies in our immune system. Firstly, viruses must bind receptors. Virus receptors are molecules made by the cell to which a virus binds in order to enter the cell. Our group shed new light on RSV entry by discovering a cellular entry coreceptor for RSV (2011) and then we discovered the receptor in 2020 . The purpose of our studies is to understand the RSV-receptor interaction so that we can develop drugs that block these interactions. In summary, we are discovering the cellular factors that RSV uses to infect cells as the basis of new drugs to block RSV infection.