an interview with dr dalan bailey
dr dalan bailey is group leader at the pirbright institute and works on the molecular biology of rna viruses. in this interview, he tells us more about how he has worked to develop vaccines for the nipah virus in pigs, and the impact his research has on understanding viruses and therapeutics.
tell us more about your current research.
my research group, the viral glycoproteins group at the pirbright institute (who you can also follow on twitter) work on a range of rna viruses, mostly paramyxoviruses and pneumoviruses. we work on a pretty diverse range of projects from virus-host range, zoonosis, vaccine development and high-throughput assay design to innate immunity, mechanisms of viral entry/egress and viral replication. it’s tough to manage such a wide range of projects but no two days are the same and it keeps me interested! the viruses we do this research on currently include respiratory syncytial virus (rsv, both human and bovine), the morbilliviruses (measles and everything else), and lastly nipah virus.
some of your work has focused on diagnostics, vaccines and therapeutics for nipah virus. can you tell us more about this?
we were happy to get involved in a large innovate uk-funded consortium led by professor simon graham at the pirbright institute. this is an international effort to help develop nipah vaccines for use in pigs. the first outbreak, which occurred in 1998/1999 in malaysia, spread from bats to pigs, and then on to humans. our efforts are directed towards preventing this transmission chain from taking place again, as well as protecting pigs from the virus, as they can act as a potential amplification reservoir and increase the risk of spreading to people. nipah also devastated the malaysian pig industry and we want to be in a better place to deal with this sort of outbreak if it happens again. throughout the project, my team have worked on developing assays to quantify the neutralising antibody response to a range of vaccines. we’ve also been involved in making our own vaccine – my first steps into the world of vaccinology. all in all, this has been a great experience and we’ve worked with some fantastic scientists from across the world.
what impact do you hope this research will have on understanding viruses and therapeutics?
realistically, we hope to be able to identify a vaccine, or multiple vaccines, that will work in pigs to: a) prevent them from getting the disease, and b) prevent them from infecting farm workers and other susceptible individuals. more broadly, we hope this data can be used to support the generation and testing of vaccines for use in humans. nipah cases are quite rare and there is no easy way to perform clinical trials in the field. we hope that our immunogenicity data, as well as other work ongoing work in the field, may get us closer to developing a human vaccine for nipah virus.
why does understanding and evaluating the impact of vaccination on emerging viruses matter to microbiology?
in the end the main job of a microbiologist should be preventing disease. however, the spectrum of what type of research falls under this statement is, in my eyes, very wide. fundamental basic research on virus replication or entry pathways is as important as the applied vaccinology we’ve recently been involved in, as is the basic field epidemiology and computational modelling (to name just a few specialties). to understand which emerging viruses pose a risk to humans or animals, microbiologists across this spectrum need to work together to understand how and why viruses emerge, whether our basic understanding of related viruses is applicable, and if our vaccination approaches are likely to be successful. without this mutual understanding we’d be poorly placed to deal with emerging viruses.
