Professor Luke O'Neill

speaker

1,535 appearances 7 recordings 2 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 3 Sep

Professor Luke O'Neill’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 3.

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Show Me the Science with Luke O'Neill · The Science of Hantavirus · 30 Jul 2026 podcast

But even still, that was a very sad case where people caught this virus on a cruise ship.

And those deaths, you know, all deaths are tragic, of course.

And one particular person actually that I was in touch with, one of them was Dutch.

was sent to a lab in Nijmegen, and the guy in charge of that lab contacted me because they saw in this young person a particular part of the immune system that I work on.

It's called IL-18.

And they asked me, did I know of anybody with a drug to target IL-18?

And I gave them some contact names.

I'm not quite sure what happened next, but the person survived.

So it just shows you.

So there's a big network of people in touch with each other.

And that IL-18 signal is interesting.

That's a very inflammatory process that must have been kicked off by the virus.

Now, the good news there was they learn about it.

And all these cases get documented and can we then maybe, will that be useful?

If there's another outbreak of Hanta anywhere, you never know, it could be very useful for us to study.

But overall, remember, it is very, very hard to catch.

Even from human to human, the circumstances have to be something like a cruise ship.

In other words, one other big outbreak, the last one actually,

which was a good few years ago now, was in Argentina.

And it was in a social gathering, right, like a big party was going on.

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