Dr David A Matthews

I am primarily interested in virus host cell interactions with an emphasis on respiratory viruses, in particular adenovirus, but also coronaviruses, respiratory syncytial virus, influenza and Hendra virus.  I have been looking at how these viruses interact with the host cell using state of the art techniques including laser confocal microscopy, high throughput quantitative mass spectrometry and Deep Sequencing (or Next Generation Sequencing) of virus infected cells.  In collaboration with Dr Davidson here at Bristol we also apply these techniques to the study of Dengue virus.

Most recently we have become very interested in the study of novel zoonotic agents such as SARS-Cov-2, Hendra, MERS and Ebola.  We are at the forefront of developing novel intergrated high throughput methods to study these very dangerous viruses in their natural hosts (bats) to try to understand why they are apparently harmless to their natural host but highly lethal in humans.

In addition, we also use these high throughput approaches to study recombinant gene therapy systems (especially adenovirus based ones). This includes an emphasis on the molecular basis of oncolytic or cancer killing adenoviruses.