Joaquim Segalés - Biography#

Joaquim Segalés has been working with swine infectious disease research since 1993 and zoonotic coronaviruses since 2014. Several fields of infectious pig diseases have been continued during last 5 years, but his research has been strongly reconducted to the side of viral infections of animals with impact on public health. Besides working with single stranded DNA viruses of swine, namely porcine circovirus 2 (PCV-2) and torque teno sus viruses (TTSuVs) and, recently, porcine circovirus 3 (PCV-3), his research has focused on zoonotic coronaviruses, namely Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) and severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Work on ssDNA viruses has been focused on epidemiology, genotyping and control of PCV-2, one of the most economically significant cause of economic losses in the swine industry. Moreover, his group has described the first infections in Spain with PCV-3 and its role in disease has been a matter of research from our group, The studies on MERS-CoV focused on the development of animal models to test vaccine products. This is of paramount importance in the Middle East, since most human infections (lethality higher than 30%) are due to zoonotic transmission from the dromedary camel to people. Besides a first experiment with this animal species, we adopted llama and alpaca as surrogates for camelid infections and we demonstrated the efficacy of vaccines based on S protein of MERS-CoV, while those based on RBD (receptor binding domain) did not work. With the advent of COVID-19, we jumped right away from MERS-CoV to SARS-CoV-2 together with partners with expertise in human medicine and research as well as supercomputing. This allowed Dr. Segalés research group the development of animal models for this novel infection, mainly golden Syrian hamsters and hACE2 transgenic mice and test different vaccines as well as antibodies. This current research line is in constant expansion. This new direction allowed the group establishing new national and international relationships with universities, research centres and pharmaceutical industry. All these investigations allowed Dr. Segalés being the advisor or co-advisor of 7 different PhD students during last 5 years, plus 5 more with an ongoing thesis. All these investigations allowed Dr. Segalés participating, as co-author, in 91 international peer-reviewed papers since 2017.