Ama Essuman: Creating a healthier world by understanding stress and infectious disease response

This story was written in the spring of 2024 by GRAD 5144 (Communicating Science) student Meredith Snyder as part of an assignment to interview a classmate and write a news story about her research.

Combatting infectious disease on a global scale starts with really small experiments — and a passionate researcher. Ama Essuman has the ambitions and the passion to be a figure in infectious disease research at the global level.

    Currently a Virginia Tech Ph.D. student studying Herpes Simplex Virus (HSV), Essuman’s interest in this field is broad. Her engagement in infectious disease research stems from a desire to promote and protect human health in all parts of the world, especially areas that suffer the most from their spread.

    Essuman, a member of the biomedical and veterinary sciences graduate program in Andrea Bertke’s lab at the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine, believes that there is still a lot of fundamental research to be done on the mechanisms behind these types of diseases, and she aims to be a part of disentangling their complex pathways to infection. This is accomplished by studying diseases at the molecular level. Essuman is quite literally doing small-scale work with a large impact.

    As an undergraduate student in Ghana, Essuman became involved in projects working with infectious viruses. This led her to pursue a master’s degree program in drug development. Through this experience, she found that her interest is not tied to one infectious disease but rather centers around understanding how diseases work and how to mitigate their impact on people. Valuing the outcome of her research efforts and the research process, Essuman made the decision to pursue a Ph.D. She chose to come to Virginia Tech to further advance her knowledge and skills to study infectious viruses and to expose herself to other cultures, ways of thinking, and academic pathways.

    Essuman’s ambition to improve how the world understands infectious disease starts with her current project on Herpes Simplex Virus, which will essentially narrow down how stress can trigger the activation of a latent virus. HSV is a virus that can infect our neurons and stay dormant there for the rest of our lives. When its host – a human being – becomes stressed, the virus can reactivate, or “wake up,” and cause fever blisters, eye disease, genital lesions, or, in some cases, life-threatening encephalitis. Essuman is determining how the release of the stress hormone epinephrine may cause a cascade of cellular processes that promotes this reactivation process and allows recurrences of disease and spread of the virus to new hosts.

    “Most people think HSV is a benign disease because it can cause asymptomatic infection,” says Andrea Bertke, principal investigator in the lab Essuman works in, “but it can also cause life-threatening disease. HSV affects skin, nerves, and the immune system, so Ama will be able to apply her understanding of the disease process to many different types of viruses.”

    Essuman thinks that the answer may be found in a gene called Latency Associated Transcript (LAT), which she can manipulate to see the effects of epinephrine on the infection, based on which sections of the gene are changed in the virus. She does this in her lab using cultured primary neuron cells and the virus with different LAT gene mutations. Based on how each of these mutations responds to epinephrine, she learns more about the LAT gene and how it functions in HSV infections.

    The World Health Organization estimates that about 3.7 billion people around the world are infected with HSV. Understanding the reactivation of this virus from latency is the first step towards preventing billions of people from suffering its effects.