Imagine you are a virologist. You are doing monkeypox research, and to better understand which genes make monkeypox lethal, you want to study the genetic components of one of the clades with high fatality of monkeypox and the We are extracting the components of the more contagious clade. (You’re a virologist, so you know that a clade is a group of organisms that share certain genetic traits.) Combine them to have both lethal and contagious versions of the trait. Creates a new monkeypox variant.
Is this study covered by U.S. guidelines requiring increased safety scrutiny for potentially deadly pandemic research?
Under current guidelines, this isn’t really clear.For researchers at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) schedule In such experiments, the safety committee determined that they Exam exemptionAfter all, monkeypox is not a “potential pandemic pathogen”, one of the very high-risk viruses the guidelines cover, like influenza and coronaviruses.
Current guidelines also target the study of viruses that have been “enhanced” to be more dangerous, but NIAID researchers believe the new hybrid virus is more deadly or more contagious than the starter strain. He said he didn’t expect it to be high. More contagious than the starter strain.
This may seem like an odd way of deciding when it is appropriate to raise safety standards for virology research. The end result is how much damage will be done if a person is infected, not how much. Accidents in laboratories around the world occur with alarming frequency.
Fortunately, a new set of proposed guidelines release Last week, the National Biosecurity Scientific Advisory Board (NSABB) will change the way it evaluates research that could lead to a pandemic. Hopefully, the process will be more transparent and streamlined while keeping the public safer from potential catastrophes.
Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told me this represents “a lot of important progress.”
Defining Pandemic Likelihood by Outcome
A simple way to define whether a study is subject to additional safety oversight is: Is the final or intermediate result of the work a virus that could cause a pandemic? If so, additional safety surveillance is probably appropriate!
This is the approximate standard advocated in the newly proposed guidelines, which was rarely the case previously.
The NSABB Board has found significant shortcomings in the current standards. “The current definition of PPP is [potential pandemic pathogen] and enhanced PPP (ePPP) are too narrow,” wrote the report. “Overemphasis on pathogens that are ‘highly’ contagious and ‘highly’ likely to be pathogenic could overlook research into the creation, transmission, or use of pathogens that are likely to cause pandemics. there is potential.”
Suppose a pathogen is incredibly contagious, but has a small fatality rate. It may not sound that bad, but I explained Covid-19. killed tens of millions of people around the worldAs we all know by now, a pathogen as deadly as SARS-CoV-2 would still be devastating if it were highly contagious enough to spread globally.
Furthermore, under current standards, if a method of making a virus more contagious or lethal involves exchanging a component of the virus with another variant that is more contagious or lethal, it is also “enhanced.” is not considered. virus. But of course, in the sense that public policy should care — the potential for millions of people to die — change is clearly an enhancement!
“It’s not the initial pathogen that’s important, it’s the resulting pathogen,” Inglesby said. “If it results in a new pathogen or a new variant with a new high contagiousness or a new high lethality, it will be subject to surveillance.”
The NSABB Board has proposed these revised guidelines.
“USG P3CO policy could be reasonably expected to enhance the contagiousness and/or virulence of pathogens (i.e., PPPs and non-PPPs) so that the resulting pathogens could reasonably be expected to Clarify that the research requires federal departmental level review Demonstrate the following characteristics that meet the definition of a PPP:
- It is probably moderately or highly contagious and can spread widely and uncontrollably in human populations.and/or
- Likely to be moderately or highly toxic and likely to cause significant morbidity and/or mortality in humans
A pandemic is a nightmare. Our policy should reflect that.
Over the past few decades, biologists have greatly improved their ability to understand and manipulate DNA and RNA. It is of great benefit to mankind, and no one wants to stop the research leading to its advancement.
However, it is not uncommon for pathogens to escape from laboratories.It’s not like a conspiracy theory — as latest investigative series With the intercepts discovered, lab accidents happen far more often than we know, and rarely lead to significant policy changes. And given how damaging a pandemic can be, research to create new pathogens with pandemic potential will require a level of oversight that governments have struggled to articulate so far. This means that you must receive
Part of the confusion stems from scaling challenges around catastrophic risk. Most workplace safety rules are premised on protecting the lives of perhaps dozens of employees. Engineering reliability rules for bridges and skyscrapers are meant to protect the lives of hundreds, possibly thousands, of people.
If anything goes wrong — if those rules aren’t strict enough or enforced — it’s a very bad day for those people, but it won’t be over. Pandemic prevention rules are needed to save millions of lives. A mistake in a lab that unleashes something like Covid, or worse, could endanger not only the people working in that lab, but all of us. The degree is quite different from others.
Overheading all this is the question of the true origin of the Covid-19 pandemic. While there is no conclusive evidence that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was born in the laboratory, the very fact that it is difficult to know exactly what happened at the Wuhan Institute of Virology has given us some time. should give a stop. The number of biolabs devoted to researching the world’s most virulent pathogens Growing, as well as our ability to fiddle with the genetics of viruses. A dangerous combination.
The new guidelines are not perfect. For one thing, they are still focused on the United States, and effective efforts to prevent man-made pandemics and ensure that dangerous research can be conducted safely need to be global. , which is a big step towards making the rules more consistent, more rational, and more focused on where the risks are highest.
A version of this story first appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here to subscribe!
Instructions, 1:00 PM ET: This article has been updated to clarify that “virulent” in this context refers to how deadly the virus is and “contagious” refers to how easily the virus spreads. I was.
