A New Lab-Made COVID-19 Virus Puts Gain-of-Function Research Under the Microscope

On October 14, a team of scientists at Boston University released a pre-print study reporting that they had created a version of SARS-CoV-2 combining two features of different, existing strains that boosted its virulence and transmissibility. Scientists and the public raised questions about the work, which refocused attention on such experiments, and prompted the U.S. government to investigate whether the research followed protocols for these kinds of studies. The concerns surround what is known as gain-of-function studies, in which viruses, bacteria, or other pathogens are created in the lab—either intentionally or unintentionally—that possess more virulent and disease-causing features than is found in nature. The controversy is especially fraught in the context of COVID-19, as questions about where the virus originated—whether it jumped from animals to people or whether it was created in the Wuhan Virology Institute by scientists studying earlier coronaviruses—remain unresolved. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Those questions continue to plague experiments involving SARS-CoV-2, and heighten scrutiny on such experiments, especially by government regulators, and might have been unremarkable had they involved other viruses, says a scientist who requested not to be on the record. In fact, lab studies pushing the virus toward becoming resistant to known drugs are requested by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration—such work helps doctors...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 Source Type: news