Forging the future of veterinary virology

“This is what I’ve been missing my whole life.” That’s what Estefany L. Cotto-López thought during her first course in virology as a masters student—and it’s what led her to the Veterinary Sciences PhD program at the University of Minnesota College of Veterinary Medicine (CVM).

With a BS in microbiology and two masters degrees—one in environmental health from the University of Puerto Rico Medical Sciences Campus, and another in One Health from the University of Florida—Cotto-López is no stranger to academic life. In her first year at the College of Veterinary Medicine, both the academic challenges she’s faced and the successes she’s experienced have grown.

Plus, she survived her first Minnesota winter.

“I didn’t know how I was going to deal with snow—this is a completely different environment for me—but this winter wasn’t so bad!” Cotto-López reported.

She had plenty to keep her busy. Cotto-López joined the lab of Dr. Yuying Liang and  Dr. Hinh Ly  to pursue her interest in virology and zoonotic diseases (diseases that can spread between animals and humans). Her interest in working with animals had developed during an internship she completed with the Veterinary Services program at the United States Department of Agriculture. “They thought I wouldn’t last long because I come from a public health background and went from working in offices to working on farms,” Cotto-López described. “But I was thrown in to work with cattle and I fell in love with it.”

Her current work focuses on a swine virus called Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome (PRRS) virus, a serious disease that manifests in reproductive failure or death in pigs due to complications from fetal development or pneumonia. In addition to animal welfare concerns, the disease causes significant economic loss, costing U.S. pork producers over half a billion dollars each year.

With the Liang/Ly lab team, Cotto-López is exploring the use of Pichinde virus—a virus that’s not known to cause disease in animals or humans—to develop improved vaccines for PRRS and other diseases.

Her work on this cutting edge of virology has quickly won her accolades, including an invitation to participate in a highly competitive summer training program through the Kansas State University’s Center of Excellence for Emerging and Zoonotic Animal Diseases. The 2024 BSL-3 Training/Transboundary Animal Disease Summer Program is sponsored by the USDA Agricultural Research Service and will be conducted at the Biosecurity Research Institute  of the  Kansas State University, adjacent to the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility (NBADF). The NBADF is a newly constructed biocontainment lab for large animal research that’s the first of its kind in the United States, and one of only a handful in the world.

“I want to get as much training as possible to learn how to work with pathogens at a high biosecurity level,” said Cotto-López. “My ultimate goal is to work in a BSL4 facility”—a facility with the highest level of biosecurity, such as the NBADF, where high-consequence animal pathogens can safely be studied.

Along with that honor, she received the Maheswaran Graduate Fellowship from the College of Veterinary Medicine, along with a MNDrive Global Food Ventures award for her work toward the development of vaccines for swine diseases.

With her regular travels between the Liang/Ly lab on the U of M St. Paul campus and Worthington, MN where she works with pigs at the Vaxxinova company, the summer program at Kansas State, and a trip to Ohio to attend the annual conference of the American Society for Virology (“It’s like Diseyland for virologists”), Cotto-López’s summer is shaping up to be just as head-spinning as her first year at CVM.

“There’s a line in a song by the band Florence and the Machine that goes ‘Happiness hit her like a train on a track,’ and it’s the perfect description,” she said. “I’ve had doors open for everything at the same time. It’s been a lot to handle all at once. But I’m living my dream! I just need to remember to stop and breathe sometimes.”