thescientist | Ralph Baric, an infectious-disease
researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, last week
(November 9) published a study on his team’s efforts to engineer a
virus with the surface protein of the SHC014 coronavirus, found in
horseshoe bats in China, and the backbone of one that causes human-like
severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in mice. The hybrid virus could
infect human airway cells and caused disease in mice, according to the
team’s results, which were published in Nature Medicine.
The
results demonstrate the ability of the SHC014 surface protein to bind
and infect human cells, validating concerns that this virus—or other
coronaviruses found in bat species—may be capable of making the leap to
people without first evolving in an intermediate host, Nature reported. They also reignite a debate about whether that information justifies the risk of such work,
known as gain-of-function research. “If the [new] virus escaped, nobody
could predict the trajectory,” Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the
Pasteur Institute in Paris, told Nature.
In October 2013, the US government put a stop to
all federal funding for gain-of-function studies, with particular
concern rising about influenza, SARS, and Middle East respiratory
syndrome (MERS). “NIH [National Institutes of Health] has funded such
studies because they help define the fundamental nature of
human-pathogen interactions, enable the assessment of the pandemic
potential of emerging infectious agents, and inform public health and
preparedness efforts,” NIH Director Francis Collins said in a statement at the time. “These studies, however, also entail biosafety and biosecurity risks, which need to be understood better.”
Baric’s
study on the SHC014-chimeric coronavirus began before the moratorium
was announced, and the NIH allowed it to proceed during a review
process, which eventually led to the conclusion that the work did not
fall under the new restrictions, Baric told Nature. But some researchers, like Wain-Hobson, disagree with that decision.
The
debate comes down to how informative the results are. “The only impact
of this work is the creation, in a lab, of a new, non-natural risk,”
Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist and biodefence expert at Rutgers
University, told Nature.
But Baric and others argued the
study’s importance. “[The results] move this virus from a candidate
emerging pathogen to a clear and present danger,” Peter Daszak,
president of the EcoHealth Alliance, which samples viruses from animals
and people in emerging-diseases hotspots across the globe, told Nature.
