Dr. Schountz’s lab of the Center for Vector-borne Infectious Diseases (CVID) is interested in understanding immune responses of bats to bat-borne human pathogenic viruses that typically lead to apathogenic infections in the bats. Current areas of interest are H18N11 bat influenza A virus, coronaviruses (MERS-CoV, SARS-CoV-2), and paramyxoviruses. Most work in the lab focuses on bat-borne viruses using a unique breeding colony of Jamaican fruit bats as an animal model.
Active projects are funded by NIAID to develop a better understanding as to why bats can host such high impact human pathogens that cause no discernible disease in bats. Bats have a number of seemingly unusual immunological features about them, including a robust type I interferon response, little evidence of inflammation, and little evidence of affinity maturation that typically leads to high titered antibody responses. These unusual features have undoubtably shaped the genomes of bat viruses, and it may be that they also contribute to the highly pathogenic nature of bat-borne viruses in humans.
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Tony Schountz, an immunologist at Colorado State University, has studied antibody responses to hantavirus in rodents for years. More recently, his team has focused on searching for ways to prevent or treat the illness in people.
Dr. Tony Schountz received a 2026 One Health Faculty Pilot award to study the impact of cadmium on bat health and viral transmission dynamics.
To bat immunologists such as Tony Schountz, the level of virus shedding is intricately related to the so-called immunological détente between pathogens and their bat hosts. “It’s a relationship in which the virus and the host effectively say to each other, ‘If you don’t bother me, I won’t bother you,’” he says.