George Mason scientist secures $1.4M DTRA grant to study viruses’ impact on organ health

George Mason University researcher Aarthi Narayanan recently secured a $1.4M grant from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) to investigate how an infection spreads between organs, and how a therapeutic will impact connected organs. The work will initially focus on mosquito-transmitted viruses while Narayanan hopes to expand the implications from these studies to other human disease states.

The study will utilize the organ on a chip platform—an emerging technology that more closely replicates human organ-based parameters—to understand how disease affects the body. The focus of this multiorgan effort will be to explore the interactions between the brain, the lung, and liver.

“When you look at an infection like West Nile Virus, for example, it affects the brain early. But that does not mean it only impacts the brain,” said Narayanan, a professor in the Department of Biology in the College of Science. “There is often multiorgan involvement in later states of disease, but we still don’t have a full understanding of how one organ reacts to another’s infection to then know how to provide more effective treatments.” This research seeks to better understand to what extent inflammation from one infected organ will affect another organ that is perhaps not infected.

The recent COVID-19 pandemic underscored how diseases affecting specific organs can disseminate throughout the body, leading to multiorgan failure at various states of disease progression. However, developing specific treatments for each emerging virus takes time, and there is an intense push toward finding broadly applicable solutions that may be used to treat different infections. This study will also explore repositioning existing FDA-approved medications as treatment options for several mosquito-transmitted viruses that do not have treatment strategies at this time.

Narayan will utilize CN-Bio’s organ on a chip platform at George Mason’s Biomedical Research Laboratory to investigate questions that are directly relevant to human disease caused by these mosquito-transmitted viruses.

“This approach will also help us position our therapeutic strategies better and hopefully decrease points of failure down the road, as we strive to come up with rapidly deployable solutions to address the national and global needs for pandemic preparedness,” said Narayanan.

“While technology is expanding in the biomedical field, one of the important differentiators that puts George Mason and its Biomedical Research Laboratory (BRL) at the forefront of this research venture is our ability to ask these globally impactful questions in high containment settings, specifically biosafety level 3 conditions,” said Cody W. Edwards, George Mason College of Science interim dean.

Established through the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the George Mason BRL is one of 12 Regional Biocontainment Laboratories in the United States that offer Biosafety Level-3 (BSL-3) facilities.

The study, “Development of human-based, connected multiorgan microphysiological system in vitro models to study alphavirus infection and support countermeasure development,” will take place over the next five years.