Moving beyond metagenomics to find the next pandemic virus

I was asked to write a commentary for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences to accompany an article entitled SARS-like WIV1-CoV poised for human emergence. I’d like to explain why I wrote it and why I spent the last five paragraphs railing against regulating gain-of-function experiments. Towards the end of 2014 the US government announced a pause of gain-of-function research involving research on influenza virus, SARS virus, and MERS virus that “may be reasonably anticipated to confer attributes to influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses such that the virus would have enhanced pathogenicity and/or transmissibility in mammals via the respiratory route.” From the start I have opposed the gain-of-function pause. It’s a bad idea fostered by individuals who continue to believe, among other things, that influenza H5N1 virus adapted to transmit by aerosol among ferrets can also infect humans by the same route. Instead of stopping important research, a debate on the merits and risks of gain-of-function experiments should have been conducted while experiments were allowed to proceed. Towards the end of last year a paper was published a paper on the potential of SARS-virus-like bat coronaviruses to cause human disease. The paper reawakened the debate on the risks and benefits of engineering viruses. Opponents of gain-of-function research began to make incorrect statements about this work. Richard Ebright said that ‘The only impact of this work is...
Source: virology blog - Category: Virology Authors: Tags: Basic virology Commentary Information aerosol transmission benefits coronavirus ferret gain of function H5N1 influenza MERS metagenomics moratorium pathogenicity pause risks SARS viral viruses Source Type: blogs