Meet our team

Isabel Sola has been working in the coronavirus (CoV) field for more than 25 years. Her first publications addressed the development of strategies to provide passive protection against CoV infections by the engineering of neutralizing antibodies to be orally administered. Recombinant antibodies were expressed in the mammary gland of transgenic animals and in different systems such as mammalian cell cultures, bacteria and plants.

She made relevant contributions, with a team of collaborators, to understand the coronavirus transcription mechanism by identifying novel transcription-regulatory RNA motifs and long-distance RNA-RNA interactions required for optimal transcription. These studies have significantly contributed to the currently accepted model for CoV discontinuous transcription, a unique mechanism in RNA viruses.

She and her team also contributed to understand the mechanisms of coronavirus-host interactions involved in pathogenesis, with special emphasis on the interference with innate immune response pathways. She and her team identified virus accessory genes involved in virulence by modulating innate immune responses. Her team demonstrated the relevance of small non-coding RNAs in CoV-host interactions, by the identification of small viral RNAs and host miRNAs that contribute to the SARS-CoV-induced lung inflammatory pathology. This knowledge will contribute to attenuate the virus for vaccine development and to define potential targets for antivirals.

The subject of the current application, which is built on her previous work and expertise, is to study the contribution of dysregulated inflammation or viral RNA persistence as potential mechanisms of pathogenesis in post-acute sequelae of COVID-19 (PASC) syndrome in order to identify novel therapeutical approaches.