100 % (project start by agreement)

Our research is driven by a passion to uncover the critical stages in the life cycle of morbilliviruses, such as canine distemper virus (CDV), and understand how they cause disease.These viruses are notorious for triggering severe immune and respiratory disorders, and in the case of CDV, they can also often invade the brain, leading to neurological damage in dogs.While vaccines are available, the development of effective antiviral therapies remains a vital priority for controlling these infections, a challenge our lab is committed to tackling. We focus on designing both host-targeted and virus-targeted antivirals, ranging from small-molecule compounds to multivalent synthetic single-chain antibodies.

In this project, we aim to unravel the mechanistic and structural secrets of the highly conserved envelope fusion protein shared by measles virus (MeV), CDV, feline morbillivirus (FeMV), and porcine morbillivirus (PoMV). By mapping these molecular details, we not only shed light on morbillivirus evolution and their potential to jump between species but also lay the groundwork for discovering potent neutralizing single-domain antibodies and derived engineered multivalent constructs with broad, cross-morbilliviral activity.

The project is funded by the Multidisciplinary Center for Infectious Diseases (MCID) at the University of Bern (https://www.mcid.unibe.ch/)
and is conducted in close collaboration with structural biology (Group of Prof. Dimitrios Fotiadis, IBMM, University of Bern).