A $505,000 Grant Backs Vassar Alum’s Search for Clues to the Next Flu Pandemic
Vassar alum Emily Bruce ’07 has been awarded a $505,000 grant to investigate how certain influenza viruses can potentially cause pandemics. Bruce, an Assistant Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at the Robert Larner M.D. College of Medicine at the University of Vermont, received the highly competitive grant—awarded to fewer than 3 percent of all applicants—from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. The grant will fund a five-year study by Bruce and her team of researchers at the Larner College of Medicine.
Bruce’s research focuses on how and why certain flu strains found in animals can successfully infect human cells. This is key to preventing an influenza pandemic, which begins when an influenza virus that infects animals (often birds) gains the ability to infect humans. Influenza A viruses infect a wide variety of species, and the viruses circulating in each of these animal hosts typically differ from the viruses that currently infect people (i.e., the ones you get a flu shot against each year). Viruses are parasites that replicate inside the cells of their host—or, as Bruce explains, “Viruses are like pirates who don’t have their own ship. So they find ways to hijack cells, the same way pirates would capture and repurpose existing ships to travel the seas.”
Bruce graduated from Vassar with a degree in biochemistry and earned her master’s and PhD degrees at the University of Cambridge, where she was awarded a Gates Cambridge Scholarship. “My PhD work involved identifying the cellular pathway used by human influenza viruses to transport their genome segments and assemble new virus particles,” she says. “In our new study, we will try to answer a question I’ve been wondering about for many years: How does viral assembly work in avian cells that host avian influenza viruses? Do they use the same pathway that human viruses use in human cells or rely on different machinery?” The goal, she says, is to expand our understanding of the barriers that exist between avian influenza viruses and the ability to infect human cells successfully. This information can aid in accurate risk assessments for emerging influenza viruses (such as the highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1 currently infecting U.S. dairy cattle) and in the development of better medications to prevent future infections.
Bruce added that while she and others in the field are grateful for private funding from foundations such as the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, it does not make up for the significant loss of government support from such agencies as the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which were instrumental in enabling scientists to develop the vaccines that combated the COVID-19 virus rapidly. “What is happening to scientific research in this country is absolutely an existential crisis,” she says. “The gulf between what is newly possible today, scientifically, and the access to stable funding to carry these experiments out has never felt so large.”