Host-Pathogen Dynamics

Dr. Nihal Altan-Bonnet heads the Laboratory of Host-Pathogen Dynamics at the National Institutes of Health in the USA. Her lab is comprised of a multidisciplinary team of cell biologists, virologists, environmental engineers, and computational biologists who apply their talents to understand how viruses transmit themselves effectively among hosts and establish successful infections. Dr. Altan-Bonnet and her team have made groundbreaking discoveries that include:

• Discovering that PI4P lipids panvirally critical for infection by RNA viruses (Hsu et al., Cell 2010)
• Discovering a novel highly virulent viral infectious unit where viruses are transmitted en bloc inside extracellular vesicles (Chen et al., Cell 2015; Santiana et al., Cell Host and Microbe 2018).
• Discovering SARS-CoV2 and other coronaviruses use the unusual lysosomal exocytotic pathway to exit cells, disrupt antigen presentation and evade immune defenses (Ghosh et al., Cell 2020).
• Discovering that enteric viruses such as norovirus, rotavirus and astrovirus also replicate in salivary glands and transmit through saliva (Ghosh et al., Nature 2022)