A government lab in Maryland plans to make the circulating strain of monkeypox deadlier in highly controversial research on mice.
The team wants to infuse the dominant clade – which most often causes a rash and flu-like symptoms – with genes from another strain that causes serious disease.
They hope the experiment will show how different genes make monkeypox more deadly and help develop better medicines and vaccines for humans.
It comes just a week after revealed a similar experiment was being conducted at Boston University using a hybrid Covid strain.
The latest monkeypox study is funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a research arm of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
according to dr However, Richard Ebright, a microbiologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, poses the modified virus as an “exceptionally high risk” to the public if accidentally leaked.
The Maryland team would argue that their work isn’t about “boosting” a pathogen because they’re swapping out natural mutations rather than creating new ones, meaning the hybrid can’t be more lethal than the existing clades.
But the news will no doubt surprise many Americans that such research is continuing in the US despite fears that similar practices may have sparked the pandemic.
Since the current outbreak began earlier this year, there have been more than 27,000 cases of monkeypox in the United States
The Maryland study involves extracting dozens of genes from the more severe monkeypox virus clade 1 (shown left) and inserting them into the less virulent clade 2 virus. They then infect mice with the hybrid virus and monitor the course of the disease
The Maryland team’s work is being led by NIAID researcher Bernard Moss at the agency’s headquarters in Bethesda (pictured).
The work of the Maryland team is being led by NIAID researcher Bernard Moss at the agency’s headquarters in Bethesda.
In this phase of the study, dozens of genes will be extracted from the more severe Clade 1 monkeypox virus and inserted into the milder Clade 2 virus.
They then infect mice with the hybrid virus and monitor the course of the disease.
The team had initially attempted the reverse: swapping genetic material in the less virulent group into group 1 to make it less deadly, but to no avail.
The current global outbreak has been confirmed to be caused by Clade 2, the less deadly West African strain of monkeypox, which has a mortality rate of less than one percent.
Clade 1, meanwhile, kills one in 10 people it infects. It has its origin in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and spreads mainly in the Congo Basin.
Monkeypox cases are on the decline after peaking in the summer
Biden promises to crack down on virus manipulation research
The White House announced plans to crack down on virus manipulation research just days after revealed similar research was being conducted at Boston University.
In a national biodefense strategy unveiled last week, the Biden administration laid out plans to prevent and respond to future biological disaster situations like the COVID-19 pandemic.
The report highlights the risk of “accidental biological threats” caused by accidents in biosafety laboratories working with dangerous pathogens.
Last Monday, revealed that Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories had developed a hybrid strain of Covid with an 80 percent case fatality rate in mice.
Researchers defended the work, claiming it could improve our understanding of Covid and how to treat and vaccinate against it, but critics warn the benefits do not outweigh the risk of a potential leak.
Biden’s biosecurity plans, released two days later on Oct. 19, said: “The United States has a responsibility to ensure our technology, development and assistance programs do not exacerbate this risk [a lab leak] unintentionally’.
The White House report also accepts that “the risk of laboratory accidents could increase with the increasing number of laboratories around the world conducting high-risk life science research and research involving potential pandemic agents.”
There is no indication the report is in response to work at Boston University and has reached out to the White House for comment.
But the report points to the potential dangers of so-called “gain-of-function” research, when improving a virus to make it more dangerous or contagious so scientists can forestall potential outbreaks or develop therapies.
Boston University has argued that their research was not a gain of function because the original wild strain killed 100 percent of the mice exposed to it, which they believe means their work actually reduced the lethality of the virus.
The researchers outfitted the original Wuhan strain of Covid with Omicron’s spike protein — the part that helps it enter cells, making it more contagious. Critics say the combination of increased infectivity and lethality made it dangerous.
The Maryland experiment was exempted from oversight when it was given the green light in 2018 because monkeypox failed to reach the threshold for a “potential pandemic agent.”
To be considered a PPP, the pathogen must be widely transmissible, capable of spreading uncontrollably and being highly dangerous.
But at the time, monkeypox outbreaks were limited to Africa and the virus didn’t spread easily between people.
US cases could almost always be traced back to imported animals or travelers who had visited Central or West African countries.
Now that monkeypox is rampant and there are more than 26,000 cases in the US, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) plan to revisit the work.
But the study still couldn’t qualify as an “improvement” on a PPP, the agency says, because the team used existing mutations.
dr Ebright told : “A lab-created monkeypox virus … more deadly and just as transmissible as the monkeypox virus currently circulating in humans, which would potentially override vaccine protection and likely spread beyond currently vulnerable populations to the general population.”
“The risk-reward balance is essentially infinite and includes potentially existential risks.”
Amid growing concerns about such experiments, the NIH and the Department of Health and Human Services met last month to draft recommended rule changes to the NIH policy on handling and monitoring potential pandemic pathogens.
Among these proposed changes is an expansion of what constitutes a “potential pandemic agent” to include those that are highly transmissible but less virulent, as well as those that are less transmissible but have more serious adverse consequences.
The rule change, if passed next year, would impose stricter regulations on the type of monkeypox virus research to begin at the NIH.
The recent controversy surrounding the risky monkeypox research stems from years of heated gain-of-function debates that many believe led to the Covid pandemic.
The pandemic sheds light on risky research practices that the government has reluctantly funded for decades, having temporarily paused in 2014, only to resume three years later.
High-level debates over the merits of gain-of-function continue to center on the unproven theory that the coronavirus escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China.
It comes after revealed a team from Boston University had developed a hybrid Covid virus – a combination of Omicron and original Wuhan strains – that had an 80 percent case fatality rate in mice.
Boston University has argued that their research was not a gain of function because the original wild strain killed 100 percent of the mice exposed to it, which they believe means their work actually reduced the lethality of the virus.
The researchers outfitted the original Wuhan strain of Covid with Omicron’s spike protein — the part that helps it enter cells, making it more contagious.
Some experts defended the work, claiming it could improve our understanding of Covid and how to treat and vaccinate against it, but critics warn the benefits do not outweigh the risk of a potential leak.
The hybrid strain was of immediate concern due to its combination of the virus’s worst characteristics – the high transmissibility rate of Omicron and the high lethality of the original.