Professor Neil Mabbott on infectious diseases

My research focuses on investigating how infectious diseases infect the body, and how the immune system tries to stop this from happening.  

I am particularly interested in prions, which are misfolded proteins that cause infectious diseases of the brain. These diseases include Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) in cows, scrapie in sheep and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) in humans.  

Unlike most infectious diseases, in which an active immune system is involved in getting rid of the infection, prion diseases don’t trigger an immune response – they hijack it to infect the body.  

What we’re currently trying to understand is how prions reach the brain. We know they build up in the spleen first, before any clinical signs of infection, and we’re using mice as study models to try to get to the bottom of what happens next as they make their lethal journey to the brain.  

I did my undergraduate degree in microbiology at the University of Leeds, which is where my interest in prions started. There I was taught by Professor Richard Lacey, who was amongst the first to raise the alarm about the risk that BSE posed to humans. He had a big influence on my career.  

I went on to do a PhD studying African sleeping sickness at the University of Aberdeen. Working in Dr Jeremy Sternberg’s lab, I was looking into how trypanosomes – parasites spread by insect bites – manipulate the immune system to establish infection.  

From there, I first went on to a post-doctoral research role at the Neuropathogenesis Unit, Institute for Animal Health, based here in Edinburgh, where I began to study the interactions between prions and the immune system. That’s what really set me off on my research career. It’s a reminder that being in the right place at the right time – and the colleagues you work with – can have a significant impact on your career.  

At that point, very few people in the UK would have heard of prions, but within months, everyone knew about them. A new type of prion disease in humans – variant CJD – was discovered, which primarily affected young people. Up until that point, prion diseases were usually diseases of relatively old people.  

Not long after, a paper came out that showed it was most likely caused by eating beef products contaminated with BSE. Why this disease predominantly affected teens and young adults still remains uncertain.  However, since prions hijack our immune systems to cause infections, my research indicated that this group was most likely affected because they generally have the strongest immune systems.  

Scientific research is expensive, and none of our research is possible without being able to obtain funds to do it.  Funding is one of the perennial challenges of being a scientist.  As a scientist I spend a lot of my time writing grants to obtain funds to explore new scientific questions. But this is probably one of the toughest challenges of my role.  It is very exciting when you receive that email that tells you that your new grant proposal was successful and will be awarded. However, for every grant I have submitted that was successful, there were many more that weren’t. Coping with these cycles of grant submission, acceptance or rejection can be one of the toughest challenges for a research scientist.   

The long incubation period of prion diseases is also a challenge. Even in our mouse models, for example, it usually takes more than a year for clinical symptoms to appear. That not only means you’re investing a lot of time in each of your experiments, but also they can run for longer than the timescales of many grants.