In regards to swine research, Dr. Elisa Crisci is an omnipresent partner, working with other NC State departments, the North Carolina hog industry, the Marsico Lung Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University, a placenta organoid expert at Duke University and others in her role as an assistant professor of virology at the NC State College of Veterinary Medicine. 

Throughout 2025, Crisci has contributed to nine project papers with three more in the works for early 2026. She has two main lines of research involving swine: One is studying viral infections, particularly Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome, in hogs as agricultural animals, and the other is developing pigs as biomedical models for innovative translational research.

“My main work right now is studying PRRS and influenza viruses,” she says. “The other side of my research is the use of pigs as models because their anatomic and immunological characteristics are very similar to humans. They are one of the best large animal models for translational medicine.”

On the latter front, Crisci has been working with the Marsico Lung Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to develop translational models for their studies of mucus or lung diseases such as cystic fibrosis.

Most recently, she collaborated with a Case Western Reserve University assistant professor on a project funded by the Gates Foundation to test whether a flu vaccine that had been found effective in a clinical trial in adults would be successful in gestating and lactating swine as a model for pregnant women and their babies. 

Unlike humans, pigs don’t get immunity through the placenta and rely on colostrum in the first 24 hours of life and then on nursing from the mother. The goal was to see whether maternal immunity against flu could be modulated in breastfeeding moms.

“This project mainly tried to test different routes of immunization in moms and whether a route of immunization was better than another, because human neonates younger than 6 months aren’t receiving any vaccine,” she says. “They rely entirely on mom for immunity if they’re breastfeeding.”

With North Carolina swine industry partners and farmers, Crisci is studying ways to evaluate the immunogenicity of PRRSV vaccines by creating an immune biobank based on the five most common commercial vaccines to help.

“I collaborate with veterinarians to have strains isolated from samples obtained from farms,” she says. “With the immune biobank, we can try to predict which of these five vaccines will perform better in terms of immunogenicity toward a strain that we have isolated in the field.”

Once Crisci has isolated the virus, she grows it in the lab and runs tests using the banked vaccines to see whether there is one that performs better against the specific strain.

“We are trying to find a system that can predict in vitro, on a plate, how vaccines will be able to perform toward a circulating strain of a virus,” she says. “And that’s because this virus has a very high rate of mutation, so we can’t really keep up with all those mutations in terms of capacity to improve protective immunity in the field. We aim to recommend a potential vaccine to the farm that experienced an outbreak with that virus.”

Crisci recently appeared on The Swine it Podcast Show Canada to talk about the biobank and its promise as a tool for PRRSV.

How Viruses Work

In a far-reaching interdisciplinary project funded by the US Department of Agriculture, Crisci’s team also collaborates with Dr. Gustavo Machado, associate professor of emerging and transboundary diseases at NC State, who has developed a program called RABapp to track and model disease outbreaks in herds.

“He’s the epidemiologist, and I work in the virology, immunology portion of the project,” she says. “He’s trying to model, for example, the effect of vaccination against multiple strains of the virus at the barn level. I do the vaccine immunogenicity prediction portion.”

Some viruses target macrophages — small white blood cells that “eat” foreign particles. Crisci has been a pioneer in studying the pathogenesis of PRRSV in macrophages.

“I was one of the first describing the transcriptomic [the study of all RNA molecules in a cell at a specific time] profile of a specific population of interstitial macrophages that are affected during the early stage of infection,” she says. “Now we have focused on the mitochondrial dysfunction that the virus induces in macrophages.”

The work has led to using a new technology, called Seahorse, for the first time in the context of PRRSV infection to measure mitochondrial function and how well the organelles function in the cells. Seahorse is a type of extracellular flux analyzer used to measure cellular metabolism in real-time. 

The resulting paper, published in Frontiers in Immunology in October, reported “further insights into the early pathogenetic mechanisms of PRRSV-2 in key target cells” and into “the responses of macrophages to infection with distinct North Carolina viral strains, contributing to a better understanding of the complex host–pathogen interactions that govern PRRSV pathogenesis.”

Crisci has been collaborating since she arrived at NC State shortly before the COVID pandemic began and curtailed work in her new lab. 

During the early days of COVID, Dr. Michael Dickey, Camille and Henry Dreyfus Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at NC State University, reached out to her for help testing a new system developed by a team of international researchers to coat masks and other fabrics with liquid gallium for antiviral and antibacterial purposes.

“They contacted me because they needed a virologist to test the capacity of the coating to actually inhibit a virus,” Crisci says. “We couldn’t work with COVID, but we used influenza virus, and we found out that that specific coating was actually inactivating the virus in a few minutes.”

A news release about the work in 2021 said: “The coating adhered more strongly to fabric than some conventional metal coatings, and eradicated 99% of several common pathogens within five minutes.”

And a Teacher, Too 

Because of her expertise, Crisci was competitively selected to become a Fulbright Specialist in 2024 and added to a roster of researchers from a wide range of disciplines who could provide short-term, on-demand resources to overseas institutions. The appointment lasts until October 2027.

Crisci, the daughter of a human medicine radiologist technician in Italy, originally planned to become a small animal veterinary radiologist when she entered an immunopathology course in her last year of DVM curriculum in Bologna. Her adviser made a thesis project on the immunopathology of porcine circovirus available to her, and she realized she liked conducting research.

“I liked everything that was imaging, and I really liked research, but research wasn’t a good option for me living in Italy,” she says. “I ended up doing a rotation in a small clinic in the first year after graduation but won a scholarship to go to an animal health research center in Spain and had a real chance to explore the research reality.”

The scholarship was for an externship with Dr. Joaquim Segales, an internationally renowned expert on porcine circovirus. While in Barcelona, Crisci also pursued a master’s and Ph.D. in swine virology and immunology.

In addition to conducting research at NC State, Crisci teaches virology to first- and second-year veterinary students and lectures in other courses such as swine medicine rotations and translational models.

She’s collaborating and sharing her expertise with the next generation, too.