{"id":3113,"date":"2023-04-04T17:12:45","date_gmt":"2023-04-04T22:12:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/?p=3113"},"modified":"2023-04-04T17:12:48","modified_gmt":"2023-04-04T22:12:48","slug":"bats-shrug-off-viruses-and-rarely-get-cancer-were-trying-to-learn-from-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/2023\/04\/04\/bats-shrug-off-viruses-and-rarely-get-cancer-were-trying-to-learn-from-them\/","title":{"rendered":"Bats Shrug Off Viruses and Rarely Get Cancer. We\u2019re Trying to Learn From Them."},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

WSJ<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

To many people, bats are a terrifying menace, vampirish carriers of dangerous viruses\u2014including, likely, an ancestor to Covid-19<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But to researchers and biotech investors, they are a miracle mammal that could help prevent pandemics and reveal blockbuster treatments for deadly human diseases or to slow aging.\u00a0 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bats are infected with viruses that kill humans<\/a> but don\u2019t usually get sick. They rarely get cancer. They are the only mammal that can truly fly and have extraordinarily long lifespans\u2014some the human equivalent of more than 200 years<\/a>, taking body size into account.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

While the Covid-19 pandemic exposed health risks from bats<\/a>, it has also made finding out how they crush viral infections and avoid cancer and other diseases more urgent, the scientists said. Mammals have similar genomes, meaning it is possible insights from one could be applied to another. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThese are really fascinating biological creatures,\u201d said Thomas Zwaka, a stem-cell researcher at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. He is among a group of scientists who are going to bat to decode the winged mammals\u2019 superpowers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bats are \u201cnot that different from a human, but the things they can do we can only dream of,\u201d said Linfa Wang, professor in the emerging diseases program at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore, who has\u00a0studied bats for nearly three decades<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Paratus Sciences Corp.\u00a0<\/strong>is putting $100 million into researching bats to target new drugs\u00a0that could\u00a0combat\u00a0viruses as well as, potentially, cancer, diabetes, aging and other conditions. Dr. Zwaka is a founder and Dr. Wang is a founding adviser to the biotech company.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Working in labs in New York and Singapore, the new company has identified some promising drug targets to address inflammation\u2014which plays a role in many diseases<\/a>\u2014and aims to have its first product in five years, said Phil Ferro, president and head of global operations. \u201cWhat we\u2019re doing is using the extreme physiology of mammals to guide us to more effective and efficient drug discovery,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases is funding studies into the immune systems of bats, which it said could lead to therapeutics for inflammation and infectious diseases. And a consortium of researchers has a project under way called Bat1K to sequence the genomes of all 1,462 living bat species.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finding a cure for Covid-19 or cancer in bats might be a long shot and could take years, some scientists said. The study of bat biology is in its infancy. Only a few labs in the world have colonies of live bats for research. \u201cWe are in a very pioneering state at the moment,\u201d said Maya Weinberg, a bat researcher in the Yovel bat lab at Tel Aviv University in Israel. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Searching for human disease cures or treatments in animals<\/a> has a long history. Scientists have probed dog DNA, snake venom and shark antibodies for insights and treatments. What makes bats stand out are their many superpowers, including harboring viruses without getting ill. They can carry Ebola<\/a>, Nipah\u2014a deadly virus carried by fruit bats that sickens pigs and people in parts of Asia\u2014and viral ancestors to coronaviruses that infect humans, though they haven\u2019t yet been found to carry the Covid-19 virus itself. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bats are one of the most diverse groups of animals on the planet<\/a>, making up more than 22% of mammal species, according to bat conservationists. They range in size from the inch-long bumblebee bat to fruit bats <\/strong>with wing spans of up to 6 feet. Spooky as they seem, they are important to the environment, eating mosquitoes and beetles, pollinating plants and reseeding forests. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Their ability to get infected and not usually become sick might be linked to adaptations they made over millions of years as they transformed into flying mammals, said Dr. Wang. Some bats fly five to eight hours a night, he said, their hearts accelerating to more than 1,000 beats a minute and their bodies burning lots of calories.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe biological pressure and stress is incredible,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some species eat their body weight in insects every day; others lap up 1\u00bd times their weight in nectar. Only three species drink blood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bats naturally limit inflammation, which occurs from stress or signs of danger. That includes DNA damage caused by the demands of flight or a viral infection, according to research Dr. Wang and his colleagues conducted. Humans become ill when their inflammatory responses kick into overdrive to fight off a virus, but bat immune systems have a more measured response, tolerating the invader.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe humans really evolved with our intelligence, with our brain development,\u201d he said. \u201cBut in terms of the immune system, I want to be a bat.\u201d He\u2019s now expanding his bat research to metabolic disease and other aspects of the bat\u2019s physiology. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bats\u2019 immune systems and response to inflammation also could help them fight off aging, said Emma Teeling, a zoologist at University College Dublin who has spent the past decade studying how long-lived wild bats age. \u201cWe found as they age, they increase their ability to repair their DNA,\u201d said Dr. Teeling, who is also a founding adviser of Paratus. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A breakthrough by Dr. Zwaka is helping virologists and bat biologists accelerate their research. Intrigued when he learned in early 2020 that the new pandemic virus could be linked to a bat, the stem-cell researcher decided to put his expertise to work to create bat \u201cpluripotent\u201d stem cells. This involves reprogramming skin or blood cells back into stem cells that, like embryonic cells, can become any kind of cell. They could be used to make different types of bat tissue for lab studies.\u00a0 Scientists had failed previously to make these cells from bats. At his lab a few blocks from a makeshift hospital in Central Park where doctors were caring for Covid-19 patients, Dr. Zwaka and his colleagues extracted cells from bat tissue that a researcher in Spain had shipped to them, and spent months trying different recipes until they found one that turned them into pluripotent stem cells. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The cells from Dr. Zwaka\u2019s lab are a step forward for researchers, said Vincent Munster, a virologist at the NIAID who is studying the effects of certain viruses on them. \u201cThese novel tools will allow us to do very detailed mechanistic studies,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The large, round bat stem cells the researchers produced look very different from other mammalian cells. They have tiny vesicles that contain virus-like structures, and many genes not present in other stem cells that activate\u00a0<\/strong>when a virus infects a cell, Dr. Zwaka said. Many viral genes are integrated into their genome\u2014further evidence of how bats tolerate viruses, he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThey seem to be genetically wired to support viruses,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He and his team are creating bat brain and lung \u201corganoids\u201d\u2014artificially grown clusters of cells that exhibit properties of full organs\u2014as well as blood from the stem cells. While continuing to study viral infection, they plan also to examine how bat tissues respond to cancer genes, how bat stem cells age, and how hibernation helps bats, Dr. Zwaka said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

What do you think about studying bats to find cures for human diseases and aging? Join the conversation below.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Paratus is collaborating with academic and government scientists to learn more about bats\u2019 physiology, and amassing and analyzing data from genome sequences, stem cells, and other sources. The company is comparing bat cells and human cells to understand the differences in response to stressors. It is also comparing data between bat species\u2014long-lived bats compared with short-lived bats, bats that get cancer and those that don\u2019t, and bats that live on protein-heavy diets of insects compared with those that live on fruit and nectar, said Deborah Slipetz, Paratus\u2019 chief scientific officer, a former drug hunter at Merck & Co. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHow do they handle a massive glucose load that would cause any of us to have metabolic issues?\u201d she said. \u201cThere may be unique insights into that to understand how we might control diseases such as diabetes.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WSJ To many people, bats are a terrifying menace, vampirish carriers of dangerous viruses\u2014including, likely, an ancestor to Covid-19.  But to researchers and biotech investors, they are a miracle mammal that could help prevent pandemics and reveal blockbuster treatments for deadly human diseases or to slow aging.\u00a0 Bats are infected with viruses that kill humans but don\u2019t usually […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":3114,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science-and-tech"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/Screenshot-2023-04-04-at-17.01.29.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3113"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3113\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3115,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3113\/revisions\/3115"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3114"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}