THIS SINGAPORE BAT COLONY COULD UNLOCK THE FUTURE OF MEDICINE
“Hello girl,” Randy Foo says to the small bat with big eyes, as he gently takes her out of the pouch and onto the lab bench.
Under a clinical white light he checks the bat’s wings, stomach and fur for signs of fighting or disease – anything that could threaten the colony next door. “She looks nice and healthy,” says Mr Foo, the bat colony manager, looking affectionately at the tiny creature in his gloved hand.
“In the West, [bats] are portrayed with a very bad picture – like they’re evil,” he adds. “But in Asian culture, bats essentially bring you prosperity [and] wealth.”
Asia, it turns out, might be on to something: yes, bats carry diseases, but they could be the “future of human medicine” – perhaps even an approximation of the elixir of life.
Last week, the Telegraph was granted exclusive access to Singapore’s captive bat research colony, one of only a handful worldwide, where roughly 200 nectar bats are living and breeding in a spacious cage.
For almost a decade, scientists here have been studying these small creatures in depth, in a bid to decode how the world’s only flying mammal can regulate inflammation, resist viruses like Ebola, rabies and Sars-Cov-2, avoid diabetes and cancer – and live for so long.
Unlike other small animals, some species have a lifespan of up to 40 years – roughly equivalent to a human dying aged 240, some scientists estimate.
Now, mounting discoveries are informing the design of new human drugs, with the first clinical trial for a bat-inspired anti-inflammation treatment on track to launch early next year.
Inflammation – the body’s persistent, low-grade immune activation – is a central driver of human ageing.
“Humans are fighting ageing and disease and we don’t have a good strategy, but in nature bats have already done something that we dream to achieve,” says Dr Matae Ahn, a clinician-scientist at the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine at Nanyang Technological University, who’s studied bats since his time as a PhD student at Duke-NUS Medical School.
“People think the translation of healthy ageing strategies from bats to people is science fiction, but actually it really might not be,” he says. “It’s difficult to study bats, but I don’t find it difficult to believe in bats.”
Batman’s daring crusade
The driving force behind much of this work is Linfa Wang. The professor once thought he’d study electrical engineering – instead the science faculty at the prestigious East China Normal University in Shanghai assigned him biology as a student. Since then, the twists and turns of his career have turned him into a world-leading bat expert, earning him the title of “batman”.
In his compact office in Duke-NUS’ high-rise campus, Prof Wang has leant into his nickname. There’s a large painting of a flying fox – a gift when he left Australia in 2012 – plus four shelves of related memorabilia, from a bat mug and a bat paperweight to a batman badge.
But it hasn’t been easy to broaden his focus from the pathogens bats carry – Prof Wang helped trace Hendra, Nipah and Sars viruses to the flying mammals – to the bats themselves.
At one international meeting in Melbourne in 2010, his friend Prof Peter Doherty gave him “very blunt” advice: it would be “suicidal” to focus on bat immunology, given the challenges involved. It’s the only time Prof Wang has ignored a Nobel laureate.
There were “two major clues” which convinced him bats had secrets to unlock: “When we infected bats with lethal viruses in Australia, they [showed] no symptoms at all – even with viruses from outside Australia; and when we completed the world’s first bat genome analysis, we had bioinformatic evidence to suggest bats may have something ‘unique’ for us to learn.”
Since then, Prof Wang has been credited with essentially launching a new field – and developing the tools needed to study it.
“[His] team has driven much of the current understanding of the immune and inflammatory responses of bats to infection,” says Prof Peter Openshaw, a professor of experimental medicine at Imperial College London. “Some of this success [is] based on the ability to maintain a colony of cave nectar bats in captivity – this is not possible with most bat species.”
The research colony in Singapore has gradually grown from 19 wild bats locally captured over six months in 2015 and 2016. But Prof Wang’s team has also had to develop a toolbox of new bat-specific reagents, bespoke antibody panels, bat cell lines and new serological assays – few of the elements needed to study bat biology existed 15 years ago.
“I got a SGD$10 million grant [roughly £5.3m] in 2013 and we spent almost $2 million to just build our own tools, it is very expensive and slow,” Prof Wang says.
But eventually, after “more than eight years and many millions of dollars”, a major breakthrough: in 2023, Prof Wang’s team published a paper in Cell journal which found a protein called ‘ASC2’ is the mechanism responsible for suppressing the inflammatory response in bats, explaining their incredible resilience. It may also play a key role in their healthy ageing.
Humans also carry ASC2, but the researchers suggested it has become more powerful in bats because they’re the only mammal capable of flight. This puts their bodies under huge physiological stress – the theory is that bats have evolved over millions of years to suppress their inflammatory immune response to cope.
Why is this important? In humans, the immune response is not as well controlled. While it helps us fight off pathogens and rebuild damaged tissue, it also ages us and can sometimes kill prematurely by sending the immune system into overdrive, triggering a “cytokine storm”.
In the Cell paper, researchers genetically modified lab mice to carry the protein. When tested, they showed similar inflammatory defences as bats, with the mortality rate from a lethal influenza virus dropping from 100 to 50 per cent among those with the ASC2 adaptation. Lab tests with human cells showed a similar effect, demonstrating a “therapeutic potential”.
Other conditions are also linked to chronic, low-grade inflammation – from gout and psoriasis to heart disease, diabetes and dementia.
“I see chronic diseases, many of which are inflammatory diseases, on a daily basis in hospital,” says Dr Ahn, a clinician-researcher and co-author of the Cell paper. “But we have limited cures, limited strategies to help the patients – really, we are just giving symptomatic relief.
“But if we can slow down inflammation like bats do with ASC2 protein, we can potentially greatly slow down – even prevent – inflammation-driven disease progression in humans. We’ve already demonstrated that in animal studies, the next step is clinical trials,” he adds.
‘Bats could be the future of human medicine’
That step is getting closer. In 2023, Paratus Sciences – a biotech company headquartered in the US, with research operations in Singapore – officially launched with a $100 million Series A financing round, and Prof Wang as a scientific advisor.
The vision? To translate bat research into medicines.
“There’s a lot of intrigue and curiosity because this is such a fresh approach,” says Dr Lewis Hong, the vice president for discovery research at Paratus. “I think we are unique, we’re the only company that is leveraging the evolutionary biology of bats to discover new therapeutic targets for human disease.”
So far, the drug furthest through the development pipeline is an anti-inflammation molecule, called PS1001, which is based on the ASC2 research. The drug mimics bat biology to create a treatment able to tackle multiple inflammatory diseases at once. Toxicology studies are underway, with human trials on track for early 2027.
But ambitions don’t stop there. There are more than 1,400 species of bats – they collectively make up roughly 20 per cent of all mammal species – and Paratus is building a database of genetic sequences with samples from as many as they can. So far around 150 species are included.
The company and their collaborators are combining this data with knowledge about human disease, genes and drug interactions in a “biological map”. Using AI, they can then use this to identify new therapeutic targets – Dr Hong called it their “discovery engine, or bat engine”.
Although Dr Hong avoids specifying exactly what is being prioritised next, he says Paratus has a growing pipeline of bat-inspired drugs – including for metabolic conditions, like obesity.
In March, Prof Wang, Dr Hong and Mr Foo were also authors on a paper in Communications Biology comparing how bat hearts – which can withstand an extreme range of beats per minute – have evolved compared to humans and mice.
They found that, under high stress, bats remain resistant to cellular damage that would normally injure a mammalian heart.
“The bat heart is truly remarkable,” says Dr Hong. “It seems to be resistant to mitochondrial dysfunction, which is commonly seen in human heart failure, where there’s a tremendous energy deficit. So there’s something about how the bat regulates on a metabolic level that we believe is key to solving a major pathogenic mechanism in human heart failure … We believe it’s a rich area to study.”
Others are also intrigued by the prospect. Prof Daniel Altmann, a professor of immunology at Imperial College London, says it is a “truly creative avenue” and an “an untapped resource for development of new biologics”, while Prof Aris Katzourakis, a professor of evolution and genomics at the University of Oxford called it “scientifically exciting”.
But there are drawbacks, challenges – and no guarantee the approach will work. “Evolution has shaped bat biology over tens of millions of years, and many of these adaptations are likely to involve complex interactions between multiple genes and biological pathways,” says Prof Katzourakis. “What works in bats will not necessarily translate directly into humans.”
Still, Prof Wang is confident in the promise of the flying mammals, and believes there are many more secrets to be unlocked: fruit and nectar eating bats live on a very high sugar diet without developing diabetes; are largely resistant to cancer; and have a remarkably long life span.
“Bats really could be the future of human medicine – everything from inflammation and diabetes to cancer and maybe even longevity,” says Prof Wang. “We have a lot still to learn.”
Back at the bat colony, Mr Foo finishes the health check before giving the bat a treat. “Actually she looks like Dobby, you know,” he says, smiling as the small creature with big eyes, a long snout and pointed ears laps up the watermelon juice from a pipette.
Since he joined the team in 2017, Mr Foo has focused on optimising diet and living conditions to make sure the colony thrives. The fact they’re breeding – and gradually going grey with age, with the oldest in the colony roughly 10 – is a sign his approach is working.
“We want to raise them well… we basically want the bats to be as stress-free as possible, so their biology will not change or adapt to stress,” he says. “That could mean the results from experiments will not be that accurate.”
Moments later he takes the bat, still in his gloved hand, back into the main cage. He opens his hand and she takes flight, circling the space before settling back into a raised roosting compartment with the others.
“Some are quite chill when we handle them, some are really yappy – they treat even a routine check like it’s the end of the world,” says Mr Foo. “But it’s interesting because we’re always discovering new things about them. Even after all these years with them, I’m learning things I didn’t know before.”
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2026-07-10T06:31:08Z
