Managing infection diseases rely on the availability of medical treatment. While medication, including vaccines, have been developed and are successfully used for treating and protecting individuals, to date there are still many infections for which treatment options are limited or not available. Human Enterovirus (HEV) infections are of public health concern as globally millions of people become infected each year. Most HEV infections cause only mild symptoms, however severe pathologies can occur, especially in immunocompromised individuals as well as in infants, children and the elderly. To date, no enteroviral therapies exist and new strategies are urgently needed to counter HEV outbreaks and severe pathologies in populations at risk, in particular given the fact that many countries have stopped vaccinating against the most prominent member of the HEV family, polio.
This project aims at identifying host factors crucial for the HEV life cycle by combining for the first time, state-of-the-art high-throughput CRISPR technology with physiologically relevant primary cultures of human intestinal epithelial cells (organoids). The ultimate goal is to identify novel host factors that are key regulators of the viral life cycle and might pave the way to the discovery of novel drug targets for a broad-spectrum treatment against HEV infections. Two overall objectives have been defined for this project, which are (1) identifying novel host factors essential for the life cycle of human enteroviruses (HEVs) upon infection of human intestinal organoids, and (2) deciphering the roles of these identified host factors in promoting HEV infection in humans.
