Vat-man of Cornell U

   Until very recently the Henipaviruses, carried by fruit bats, were not known to infect humans.  That changed in 1999 when the first outbreak of Nipah virus occurred in Malaysia and Singapore.  Other outbreaks followed over the course of the next two decades in Bangladesh, the Philippines and India in the summer of 2018.  “Nipah virus kills from 40 to 100 percent of infected individuals,”

Hector Aguilar-Carreno at Cornell U. says.  “All of these outbreaks were eventually contained. They happened in remote villages, but if even one of those infected people had gotten into a big city with a dense human population, it may have been a completely different story.”…

  Since Nipah virus requires the highest-level biosafety lab, which Cornell does not have, Aguilar collaborates with the National Institutes of Health’s Rocky Mountain Laboratory in Hamilton, Montana and the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia to work with the live virus.  Much of his research however does not require the full virus.  “We do 99% of our work right here at Cornell in my lab,” he says.  “We’ve engineered ways to look at viral entry and viral assembly without using the full, live virus.”…

  Aguilar and his lab are part of a large project headed by Raina Plowright at Montana State University that recently received a grant for about $10 million from the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Involving at least a dozen labs the DARPA project will look at Henipaviruses carried by fruit bat populations around the world.  The bats carry the viruses without becoming ill themselves and transmit the virus through their urine, saliva and feces. Aguilar’s collaborators will take urine samples from fruit bats and sequence them to obtain the RNA sequences of Henipaviruses the bats are carrying.  Then those sequences will be sent to Aguilar’s lab where he and his colleagues will analyze the likelihood of a particular virus leaping into humans….

  “We want to see how closely related these other Henipaviruses are to Nipah and Hendra.…They are basically a piece of genetic material. The Nipah virus for example is just six genes.  A human being has over 20,000 genes, yet these six genes are able to overcome a whole human being.  It’s amazing to see this, to discover how this happens.”   https://research.cornell.edu/news-features/deadly-virus-carried-fruit-bats

contact for Hector Aguilar, Associate Professor

Microbiology and Immunology, College of Veterinary Medicine:  e: ha363@cornell.edu

p: (607) 253-4029