The blood that flows throughout your body plays many important roles in keeping you healthy. It delivers oxygen to muscles, sends chemical messages from one organ to another, and monitors for any foreign invaders like bacteria or viruses. Thomas ‘Tem’ Morrison, PhD, leads a research team in the Department of Immunology and Microbiology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine that studies how our blood can detect and deal with viral infections.
The Morrison lab is specifically interested in how the body can immediately detect and remove virus particles from your bloodstream. You can think of your circulatory system, and the blood in it, as being like a long, lazy river at a water park. The blood takes lots of twists and turns as it flows out of the heart, circulates around the entire body, and returns to the heart. Like at a water park, lifeguards stand as first responders on the edge, watching for any disruptions or potential danger in the bloodstream. A virus resembles a trouble-making kid in the lazy river, looking to invite their wild friends and cause a bloodstream ruckus. If that bothersome kid is left unattended and not called out, he or she will likely recruit more mischief-makers and cause more disruption and damage (like when a virus replicates and spreads).
Lifeguards and the innate response
Morrison’s research team studies different sentinels – or lifeguards in our water park analogy – that monitor the bloodstream. These sentinels are the very first line of defense for the body in response to detecting a virus in the blood. The systems that respond immediately to danger, such as a viral infection in the body, are called the innate response. What a particular virus looks like on its surface or viral coat (size, shape, spike proteins) helps the innate system identify and isolate those particles away from everything else in the blood. If we can better understand what the viruses look like and the tools that our bodies use to find them, we can develop better treatments to prevent and decrease the impact of infection.
Why is this research important?
Morrison and his research team are trying to figure out how to remove viruses from the blood of infected individuals to decrease illness and reduce future infections. It’s important to remove viruses from the blood because many of the viruses Morrison’s lab studies are transmitted via mosquitoes. If there are very few viruses in the blood when a mosquito bites, this limits or prevents the virus from traveling to a new person upon the next bite. Additionally, the higher the levels of virus detected in the blood, the worse the disease often is for the infected person.
The viruses this research could impact include a variety that routinely cause massive health issues across the globe, including chikungunya, dengue, Zika, eastern equine encephalitis and La Crosse virus. Morrison’s lab is focused on how these viruses infect humans and how our bodies work to clear them. By improving knowledge of viral infections, researchers can more strategically design treatments to lessen the severe illnesses they cause.
If you want to learn more about the scientist, please head to their Meet the Scientist page.
