US suspends risky disease research
Government to cease funding gain-of-function studies that make viruses more dangerous, pending a safety assessment.
Sara Reardon
22 October 2014
https://www.nature.com/news/us-suspends-risky-disease-research-1.16192
The US government surprised many researchers on 17 October when it announced that it will temporarily stop funding new research that makes certain viruses more deadly or transmissible. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy is also asking researchers who conduct such ‘gain-of-function’ experiments on influenza, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) to stop their work until a risk assessment is completed — leaving many unsure of how to proceed.
“I think it’s really excellent news,” says Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts, who has long called for more oversight for gain-of-function research. “I think it’s common sense to deliberate before you act.”
Critics of such work argue that it is unnecessarily dangerous and risks accidentally releasing viruses with pandemic potential — such as an engineered H5N1 influenza virus that easily spreads between ferrets breathing the same air1, 2. In 2012, such concerns prompted a global group of flu researchers to halt gain-of-function experiments for a year (see Nature http://doi.org/wgx; 2012). The debate reignited in July, after a series of lab accidents involving mishandled pathogens at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia.
One of the most prominent laboratories conducting gain-of-function studies is run by Yoshihiro Kawaoka, a flu researcher at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In 2012, Kawaoka published a controversial paper1 reporting airborne transmission of engineered H5N1 flu between ferrets. He has since created an H1N1 flu virus using genes similar to those from the 1918 pandemic strain3, to show how such a dangerous flu could emerge. The engineered H1N1 was transmissible in mammals and much more harmful than the natural strain.
US announces rules for potential bioterror agents
24 Sep 2014 by Sara Reardon
http://blogs.nature.com/news/2014/09/us-announces-rules-for-potential-bioterror-agents.html
A long-awaited US government policy on biological research that could be used for terrorism or other nefarious purposes is little changed from a draft released 19 months ago, despite receiving 38 comments from institutions and researchers concerned that it goes either too far or not far enough. The centrepiece of the policy, released on 24 September, is a set of guidelines for researchers working on 15 specific pathogens or toxins. But the rules do not regulate experiments that engineer pathogens not on the list to make them more deadly – so-called gain-of-function research. Officials from the White House and US National Institutes of Health (NIH) say the government will be addressing these concerns in coming weeks.
The rules apply only to labs that receive government funding. All institutions are required to register with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) if they are using one of a longer list of “select agents” defined by the government. But experiments that would, for instance, make a pathogen not on the list more dangerous “would be outside the scope of the current framework,” Patterson says.
Such experiments would include the controversial creation of a mutant flu virus that is deadlier and more transmissible between animals.