When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, we developed vaccines relatively quickly – but effective therapeutics lagged. A team led by The Doherty Institute’s Dr Annabell Bachem is investigating whether a fundamental biological process of our body might hold the key to quickly developing lifesaving therapeutics for viruses of pandemic potential: programmed cell death.
Programmed cell death is a natural process where our cells self-destruct when they're no longer needed – or when they become infected by pathogens.
“Our bodies developed this remarkable defence system over millions of years,” explains Dr Bachem. “When a healthy cell recognises that it's infected, it can trigger its own death, effectively killing the pathogen before it has a chance to replicate and spread throughout the body.”
This approach represents a paradigm shift in how we target infections. While many antiviral strategies focus on attacking specific viral structures directly, this method targets our own cellular responses rather than the pathogens themselves. The strategy has already proven successful in cancer treatment, where similar pathways are used to eliminate cancer cells in certain types of leukemia.
The initial focus of this project is to dramatically increase our understanding of the complex ways that pathogens hijack host cells to replicate – because the more we know about these pathways and a pathogen’s ability to switch between them, the more likely we can modulate them with therapeutics.
Many pathogens have developed sophisticated mechanisms to evade or suppress our natural cell death pathways as they’ve co-evolved with humans over millions of years – they’ve learnt how to switch off the body’s defence pathways so they can survive and replicate.
“If we can successfully re-activate these pathways via therapeutics, we’re essentially supercharging what our bodies already know how to do,” Dr Bachem says.
The most exciting aspect of this research is its potential to provide broad anti-viral protection.
“What would excite me most is finding similarities across different virus classes or bacterial pathogens, because if we discover common pathways that multiple viruses or bacteria manipulate, a single therapeutic approach could potentially work against numerous threats.
“We might develop a therapy that helps us with not just one pandemic, but potentially the next five pandemics,” Dr Bachem explains. “Everyone has these pathways, so if it works, it would work on the majority of people.”
Project title: Establishing programmed cell death inhibition as defence against pathogen infections
Chief Investigator: Annabell Bachem
Co-Investigators: Dr Marcel Doerflinger, Prof Guillaume Lessene, Prof Marco Herold, A/Prof Gemma Kelly, ProfAndreas Strasser and Prof Sammy Bedoui.
Spotlight on Therapeutics: This content series profiles the projects and people behind the Cumming Global Centre for Pandemic Therapeutics innovative research.
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