Researchers at UNC are celebrating three $50,000 grants from the University’s School of Medicine. The money is dedicated to Zika research and will help scientists and doctors better understand how the disease is spread and how it affects brain cells.

Dr. Blossom Damania is the incoming vice dean for research at UNC’s School of Medicine. Her specialties in microbiology and immunology will help to guide a team of Zika researchers with the new funding.

“We really value our researchers and this is also why we awarded these grants. We want to jump-start and boost research already being conducted at UNC to fight against the Zika outbreak.”

The grants, called Emerging Challenges in Biomedical Research, will aid the study of Zika’s newly discovered link to Microcephaly – a rare neurological condition that causes infants to be born with unusually small heads, due to abnormal brain development.

This condition is a new addition to Zika, causing researchers to believe the virus is mutating.

“This is a different strain of the virus, or there’s something else. There’s a co-factor involved in why Zika is suddenly causing Microcephaly and Guillain-Barré syndrome.”

Guillain-Barré syndrome is the other newly discovered disease linked to Zika. A rare nervous system sickness, it attacks the immune system and damages nerve cells, causing muscle weakness or even paralysis.

Damania says the threats of these diseases are pushing researchers to work even harder.

“That’s just nature telling us that we don’t know as much as we should. So that’s why we do research to understand how things change – how we think that a virus that we thought had no disease can suddenly appear in the human population.”

About 75% of people infected by Zika don’t show any symptoms, Damania says, meaning that a critical issue is diagnosis. A lab test for Zika has not yet been developed, but Damania is hopeful that this new funding will help gain new insights into how the virus functions.

“What we hope is that this will position UNC investigators to get additional extramural awards from national institutes of health like the CDC and USAID that will increase our ability to mitigate the impact Zika has on human life.”

While the grants will help advance Zika research, Damania warns that progress is still slow.

“One thing to keep in mind is that this is evolving and that research is a slow process. Even though people are working fast, it might take us a while to develop effective vaccines.”

Although scientists have known about the Zika virus since 1947, Damania says it’s an ever-changing mystery that UNC researchers are committed to solving.

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