Loading

Spotlight on... Nerea Irigoyen

“For someone like me, a virologist, you think about pandemics all the time. Actually living through a pandemic was very unexpected, I never imagined that something like this would happen in my lifetime and that I would be in a position to help! ”

In the last 2 years, Nerea Irigoyen joined world-wide efforts to tackle the pandemic and find better treatments for Covid-19. In this article, she tells us about her virology research, her pioneering pandemic response and shares her experience of being a prominent Spanish researcher in the UK.

A spark of curiosity. Science and research always interested me. In secondary school, I really enjoyed studying microbes and microbiology, especially viruses, they always fascinated me more than bacteria. Then growing up in Spain, in the 80’s and 90’s, there were a lot of campaigns around HIV, especially targeting the younger population. If you went to the GP or the hospital, there were posters about HIV everywhere, how to prevent it and encouraging people to get tested. I think this had a huge impact on my choice of studies and my future career, it sparked my curiosity!

An incredible opportunity in Cambridge. While I was doing my PhD at the Spanish National Biotechnology Centre (Madrid) I had the incredible opportunity to spend three months in Cambridge working with Ian Brierley, a Professor of RNA Virology in the Department of Pathology. I really enjoyed that time and was very interested in the work the Brierley lab were doing, so after finishing my PhD in 2009, I moved to Cambridge to continue my research funded through a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Cambridge is the ultimate research hub. As a researcher in Cambridge you benefit from being surrounded by some of the best academics and facilities in the world. You can almost always find someone working on a subject you are interested in, often they are just across the road! I couldn’t imagine a better place to be, Cambridge is the ultimate research hub. During my postdoc, we started to develop this new, very promising, technique called ribosome profiling to virus-infected cells. This technique tells us which proteins are expressed in the virus’ cells at a single moment and we applied it to different types of viruses, such as coronaviruses, retroviruses (e.g. HIV) and flaviviruses (e.g. Zika virus). This turned out to be very successful work and it propelled my career towards becoming an independent group leader in September 2018.

The pandemic presented us with an opportunity. Whilst the pandemic hitting the UK in March 2020 meant I had to postpone all my Zika work, it also presented us with an opportunity to go back to our earlier coronavirus research. I had previous, unfinished projects, so I felt that I was in a strong position to contribute to the global pandemic research effort. It took us two months, but we were finally able to re-open the lab and start working on SARS-CoV-2 in May 2020.

Reversing the cell stress response reduces virus replication. We mostly concentrated on cell stress responses to virus infection. When a person is infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus invades the cells, putting them under cellular stress. In these cases, this stress is called unfolded protein response and it enables the virus to replicate. Through understanding this pathway, we were able to reverse the stress response process using different drugs and found that this reversal significantly reduced virus replication. This work has so far been successful in model systems in the laboratory, and we are now looking for funding and industry collaborators that can help us take this approach forward to pre-clinical trials.

Image on the left: Viral titrations of Zika virus. Credit: Nerea Irigoyen

Returning colleagues and a renewed focus on Zika. A few months later, once some of the restrictions were lifted, we were able to fully re-open the lab. It felt great to have my colleagues back, some of whom had only been working with us for a couple of weeks before we were all sent home! While we continued working on SARS-CoV-2, we were also able to go back to our non-coronavirus research, in particular on Zika virus. There are some similarities between coronavirus and Zika, so we’re now applying what we learned about SARS-CoV-2 to this flavivirus.

Aspirations to develop a broad-spectrum anti-viral drug. The Zika virus is mainly spread by mosquitoes, and in 2015-2016, an epidemic of Zika began in Brazil, quickly extending to other South American countries. Infection can be mild, but in some cases, particularly in pregnant women, it can lead to microcephaly and brain problems in babies. Our goal is that, using the approach of reversing the unfolded protein response we developed with SARS-CoV-2, we can help develop a broad-spectrum anti-viral drug, effective not only in SARS-CoV-2, but also in other types of viral diseases, such as Zika, Dengue, Yellow fever and even some other types of viruses. Achieving this goal is one of my greatest aspirations and somehow will merge my undergraduate studies in Pharmacology and my research career in Virology.

Nerea in the lab, Department of Pathology

Learning lessons from the pandemic and preparing for the future.I think it’s very important that we learn some lessons from the pandemic. I believe that we will be faced with other outbreaks of diseases and maybe they won’t be as serious as this one, maybe they will, but we certainly need to prepare, plan and work more efficiently in the future. For example, outbreaks of mosquito-borne diseases in Europe, such as Zika, Dengue and Yellow fever, are not so unexpected as we would think. These diseases have been mostly contained to tropical countries until now, but with climate change and temperatures rising, we are finding tropical mosquitoes in Southern Europe. We are lucky to have good health systems here, but we have to be prepared to screen and diagnose these diseases for the first time in areas where they were non-existent before.

Working across disciplines could really make a difference. I think it’s also fundamental that we bring together researchers from across all disciplines to prepare for future pandemics and to answer fundamental research questions. Having been in Cambridge for the last 11 years, I think the Research Themes and the way they are bringing together people working in similar areas across disciplines and Departments could really make a difference to how we approach research questions. I’ve been invited to speak and have attended a few events and it’s incredible to know the range of expertise you have available across the School and in Cambridge.

Giving back to my country of origin. I would like to one day return to Spain and give something back to my country of origin. My education was in Spain and I wish there was more investment in science that would give us (me and my fellow Spanish researchers living abroad) more opportunities to work in Spain. I felt very motivated to do something about this and with other colleagues set up and Society of Spanish Researchers in the UK. We started from the ground up, talked to many different people, various organisations and started supporting researchers in the UK with events around personal and professional development, fellowship grants between Spanish and UK universities to promote collaboration. We also put a lot of effort into campaigning with the Spanish Government to invest more in science and in the outstanding researchers the Spanish Universities educate.

“Living through the pandemic has been hard for everyone, but for me it has also felt rewarding, showing me that working in the lab, doing my research and getting results, might one day translate into something that can change the world.”

Nerea Irigoyen is a Molecular Virologist in the Division of Virology, Department of Pathology. She is also a member of the Infection and Immunity Research Theme in the School of Biological Sciences.