Biography

Despite the progress made in preventing, understanding, and treating viral infections in the last decades, viral diseases still pose a huge social and economic cost, as was illustrated by the recent SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Thus, the identification of host cellular factors and signaling pathways involved in limiting viral infection and exacerbated immune responses, is of great importance to better characterize virus-host interactions and to develop new antivirals.

The Virus-Cell Interactions Lab studies cellular factors that modulate virus entry and the intrinsic and cell-autonomous antiviral immune responses during arbovirus (flavivirus, togavirus) and robovirus (arenavirus) infection, with the long-term goal of identifying new candidate targets for broad antiviral therapies. We use molecular and cellular biology techniques to identify those genes in vitro, and knockout/transgenic mice to test whether they can also modulate infection and immune signaling in vivo. To get mechanistic insights, we employ different approaches including proteomics, metabolomics, and advanced microscopy, to characterize how the identified proteins function in virus infection. We are currently analyzing whether signal-regulatory protein alpha (SIRPA) signaling modulates virus-induced immune responses and the role of cellular proteins targeted by SIRPA’s inhibitory activity in virus infection, such as the heavy chain of non-muscle myosin IIA (MYH9).