Bat-ting for a COVID-19 cure

Researchers, mostly of Indian origin, from the University of Saskatchewan (USask), in Canada,  have unravelled how bats carry the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and Covid-19 virus, SARS-CoV-2, without getting infected themselves.

The research could open gates towards finding out how the bats’ immunity system works, and help discover a vaccine that can boost immunity in humans against SARS-CoV-2 virus.

While MERS and SARS-CoV-2 have caused a large number of fatalities in humans, bats have remained unharmed by them.

The research was published in the journal Scientific Reports. Researchers found that despite bats being infected with the virus for months before passing it to humans or other hosts, there are adaptations in a bat’s anatomy which cause the host cells in the nocturnal creatures to coexist with the virus.

They discovered that instead of killing bat cells — as the virus does to human cells — MERS and SARS-CoV-2 viruses enters a “long-term relationship with the host cells”. This “relationship” is maintained by the bat’s ‘super’ immune system.

The team, led by researcher Vikram Misra, plans to next focus on determining how the bat-borne virus adapts to infection and replication in camelid (a group of even-toed ungulates that includes camels) and human cells.

This information could be critical to predict the next bat-borne virus, the researchers said.