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I work with a virus called Hepatitis C that infects a lot of people – about 170 million people in the world. It is a very nasty disease because many people don’t get better once they become infected. The virus infects the liver, and can cause cancer. I have discovered that it can infect the brain too….well really it infects a bit of the brain called the blood-brain barrier. The blood-brain barrier, or BBB for short, is like a ‘gate’ that only lets some things into the brain. So things like sugar are allowed into the brain, but bad stuff like viruses are normally not allowed in. If you drew a cartoon of the BBB, it might look a bit like this:

I discovered that Hepatitis C virus is able to infect the BBB, which means that things can get into the brain that wouldn’t normally be able to. Some people that have Hepatitis C say that they feel tired all the time and can’t do things they could do before they got sick, so this could be the reason why. Right now, I am trying to find out more about how viruses infect the BBB so that hopefully some day we will have medicines to stop this happening.

I normally walk to work along the canal and get to work about 9am. I check my e-mails and plan the day’s experiments. Then I usually go into the lab about 10am and spend most of my day there. We have two main labs, the tissue culture lab where I grow all the cells, and a lab we call ‘Cat 3’ which is the one we grow the Hepatitis C virus in. The Cat 3 lab is used for growing dangerous viruses or ones for which there is no cure. Hepatitis C is a virus that has no vaccine or cure, so we have to be quite careful and only work with it in this special lab. To get into Cat 3, you have to go into a little room where you get dressed in a special lab coat and gloves, and then you go into the main lab where the viruses are kept. I work with the viruses in a special cabinet which protects me from the virus. Here is a photo of me in Cat 3 holding some Hepatitis C virus