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Viruses can wreak havoc with our bodies. From a simple sore throat, to grotty runny noses or serious life-threatening diseases, infections caused by viruses can cause tons of problems. Unfortunately, we only have medicines to cure a few of these diseases and desperately want more! My job is to investigate a new way to kill viruses. Fingers crossed, the information we get from this might help other scientists to design new medicines.

In many ways, viruses are fascinating critters! They are made of the bare essentials needed to get into our cells and make copies of themselves. A bit like a hacker getting into a computer system, once they infect our cells they survive by hijacking the normal processes which keep us ticking. To do this, they have an instruction manual, made out of DNA or a similar code called RNA,  and come wrapped up in a protective coat made of proteins. There is a lot of debate as to whether they are actually even “alive”.

Hackers jacking computers normally face defences to block them from accessing the system, things like firewalls and anti-virus software. Like this, our cells have loads of strategies to block viruses from infecting them and making copies of themselves. When our cells notice that they have an unwelcome virus visiting they do two things. Firstly, they send out DANGER! signals to their neighbours, who can then arm themselves against attack. Second, they start to make special tools (enzymes) to chew up the virus and stop it making copies. Hopefully, this should zap the virus and save our cells!

Sometimes our usually awesome defences don’t work properly and the viruses can hang around for ages, causing lots of nasty damage to our bodies. Often this is because the viruses are also super-smart and can cleverly outwit our cells’ plans for killing them. My “favourite” (only kidding, it’s pretty horrible…) virus is called Hepatitis C Virus (a.k.a. HCV). HCV infects our liver cells and can really cleverly dodge the body’s virus-killing tools. When people have had HCV for a while their livers can totally pack up and really unlucky people can get liver cancer.  The drugs for HCV are not very good and cause terrible side effects, so we desperately want to find new treatments. To do this, I want to do experiments to check out in more detail how our cells zap invading viruses and then see if this new information can help to design new medicines to cure HCV.