Dr Ana Reis

Ana Reis has been working on how viruses manipulate their hosts’ immune responses for more than 20 years. Her PhD focussed on how African Swine Fever Virus (ASFV) modulates the Interferon (IFN) response, the first line of defence against viral infection. Ana continued working on viral immune evasion, as a career development fellow at the NIMR (now part of the Francis Crick Institute), carrying out research on influenza virus manipulation of cellular responses to inflammatory stimuli. 

In 2012, Ana joined the Pirbright Institute and has been working on development of live attenuated vaccines (LAVs) for African Swine Fever (ASF). She took advantage of her expertise on viral manipulation of innate immunity, to identify candidate genes that were deleted from the viral genome. Most of the deleted genes proved to be virulence factors attenuating the virus in pigs. Importantly, these attenuated viruses confer protection against challenge with the highly virulent parental isolates and are now being further developed as LAVs for commercial use.

In 2023, Ana became an Institute Fellow and now leads the “ASFV Immune Evasion” Group. The main objective of the group is to identify and characterize interactions between ASFV proteins and the host cells. This will be informed by recent advances in protein structure prediction, allowing the identification of motifs/specific residues necessary for the protein function. These detailed analyses at the molecular level, may be followed by animal studies to assess the relevance of those interactions in attenuation and disease progression, underpinning the development of ASF control strategies such as vaccines and antivirals.