Human norovirus (HuNoV) is a leading cause of acute viral gastroenteritis worldwide, causing symptoms ranging from discomfort to severe outcomes in young children, the elderly, and people who are immunocompromised. While its spread is common, effective treatment and preventative strategies are lacking due to the difficulty in cultivating the virus in laboratory settings. Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine, led by Mary Estes, PhD, worked with intestinal organoids, specifically human intestinal enteroids (HIEs), to identify why the growth of norovirus in culture stops and to determine methods to maintain growth. Typically, norovirus samples are collected from infected individuals via stool samples. Obtaining samples for research, and eventually for scale-up, is a challenge as resources are limited and inconsistent. Growing norovirus in the lab would address this limitation for both norovirus research and therapy development. “Looking to overcome this obstacle, we studied several versions of HIEs to understand why norovirus growth usually stops,” said co-author Sue Crawford, PhD, assistant professor of molecular virology and microbiology at Baylor. The research was published in Science Advances in a paper titled, “Overcoming host restrictions to enable continuous passaging of GII.3 human norovirus in human intestinal enteroids.” “In 2016, a previous breakthrough occurred when scientists in our lab and collaborators successfully grew HuNoV in HIEs, or ‘mini-guts’—miniature, lab-grown versions of the human gut,” said first author Gurpreet Kaur, a graduate student in the Estes lab. “While this system allowed researchers to infect cells and study the virus, it still had a major shortcoming—the virus would not grow…
