Most of the world has developed some level of immunity to the 2009 pandemic flu virus
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Tuesday 01 July 2014
A
controversial scientist who carried out provocative research on making
influenza viruses more infectious has completed his most dangerous
experiment to date by deliberately creating a pandemic strain of flu
that can evade the human immune system.
Yoshihiro
Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison has genetically
manipulated the 2009 strain of pandemic flu in order for it to “escape”
the control of the immune system’s neutralising antibodies, effectively
making the human population defenceless against its reemergence.
Most
of the world today has developed some level of immunity to the 2009
pandemic flu virus, which means that it can now be treated as less
dangerous “seasonal flu”. However, The Independentunderstands
that Professor Kawaoka intentionally set out to see if it was possible
to convert it to a pre-pandemic state in order to analyse the genetic
changes involved.
The
study is not published, however some scientists who are aware of it are
horrified that Dr Kawaoka was allowed to deliberately remove the only
defence against a strain of flu virus that has already demonstrated its
ability to create a deadly pandemic that killed as many as 500,000
people in the first year of its emergence.
Professor
Kawaoka has so far kept details of the research out of the public
domain but admitted today that the work is complete and ready for
submission to a scientific journal. The experiment was designed to
monitor the changes to the 2009 H1N1 strain of virus that would enable
it to escape immune protection in order to improve the design of
vaccines, he said.
“Through
selection of immune escape viruses in the laboratory under appropriate
containment conditions, we were able to identify the key regions [that]
would enable 2009 H1N1 viruses to escape immunity,” Professor Kawaoka
said in an email.
“Viruses
in clinical isolates have been identified that have these same changes
in the [viral protein]. This shows that escape viruses emerge in nature
and laboratory studies like ours have relevance to what occurs in
nature,” he said.
Prior to his statement to The Independent,
Professor Kawaoka’s only known public mention of the study was at a
closed scientific meeting earlier this year. He declined to release any
printed details of his talk or his lecture slides.
Yoshihiro Kawaoka's study has yet to be publishedSome members of the audience, however, were shocked and astonished at his latest and most audacious work on flu viruses, which follow on from his attempts to re-create the 1918 flu virus and an earlier project to increase the transmissibility of a highly lethal strain of bird flu.
“He
took the 2009 pandemic flu virus and selected out strains that were not
neutralised by human antibodies. He repeated this several times until
he got a real humdinger of a virus,” said one scientist who was present
at Professor Kawaoka’s talk.
“He
left no doubt in my mind that he had achieved it. He used a flu virus
that is known to infect humans and then manipulated it in such a way
that it would effectively leave the global population defenceless if it
ever escaped from his laboratory,” he said.
“He’s
basically got a known pandemic strain that is now resistant to
vaccination. Everything he did before was dangerous but this is even
madder. This is the virus,” he added.
The
work was carried out at Wisconsin University’s $12m (£7.5m) Institute
for Influenza Virus Research in Madison which was built specifically to
house Professor Kawaoka’s laboratory, which has a level-3-agriculture
category of biosafety: one below the top safety level for the most
dangerous pathogens, such as Ebola virus.
However,
this study was done at the lower level-2 biosafety. The university has
said repeatedly that there is little or no risk of an accidental escape
from the lab, although a similar US Government lab at the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta with a higher level-3
biosafety rating was recently criticised over the accidental exposure of
at least 75 lab workers to possible anthrax infection.
Professor
Kawaoka’s work had been cleared by Wisconsin’s Institutional Biosafety
Committee, but some members of the committee were not informed about
details of the antibody study on pandemic H1N1, which began in 2009, and
have voiced concerns about the direction, oversight and safety of his
overall research on flu viruses.
“I
have met Professor Kawaoka in committee and have heard his research
presentations and honestly it was not re-assuring,” said Professor Tom
Jeffries, a dissenting member of the 17-person biosafety committee who
said he was not made aware of Kawaoka’s work on pandemic H1N1, and has
reservations about his other work on flu viruses.
“What
was present in the research protocols was a very brief outline or
abstract of what he was actually doing…there were elements to it that
bothered me,” Professor Jeffries said.
Precautions being carried out during the 2009 outbreak, in Mexico City (Getty)“I’m a distinct minority on this committee in raising objections. I’m very uneasy when the work involves increasing transmissibility of what we know already to be very virulent strains,” he said.
Asked
what he thought about the unpublished study involving the creation of a
pandemic strain of flu deliberately designed to escape the control of
the human immune system, Professor Jeffries said: “That would be a
problem.”
Rebecca
Moritz, who is responsible for overseeing Wisconsin’s work on “select
agents” such as influenza virus, said that Professor Kawaoka’s work on
2009 H1N1 is looking at the changes to the virus that are needed for
existing vaccines to become ineffective.
“With
that being said, this work is not to create a new strain of influenza
with pandemic potential, but [to] model the immune-pressure the virus is
currently facing in our bodies to escape our defences,” Ms Moritz said.
“The
work is designed to identify potential circulating strains to guide the
process of selecting strains used for the next vaccine…The committee
found the biosafety containment procedures to be appropriate for
conducting this research. I have no concerns about the biosafety of
these experiments,” she said.
Professor Kawaoka said that he has presented preliminary findings of his H1N1 study to the WHO, which were “well received”.
“We
are confident our study will contribute to the field, particularly
given the number of mutant viruses we generated and the sophisticated
analysis applied,” he said.
“There
are risks in all research. However, there are ways to mitigate the
risks. As for all the research on influenza viruses in my laboratory,
this work is performed by experienced researchers under appropriate
containment and with full review and prior approval by the [biosafety
committee],” he added.
Pandemic flu questions and answers
Why is this experiment different from what has been done before?
This
is the first time that someone has taken a strain of influenza virus,
called H1N1, known to have caused a global epidemic, in other words a
“pandemic”, and deliberately mutated it many times over. It can then
evade the neutralising antibodies of the human immune system, which have
protected much of the human population since the virus first emerged in
2009.
What has been done previously in this laboratory?
Professor
Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison attempted to
increase the transmissibility of the H5N1 bird flu strain by genetic
manipulation and repeated infection in laboratory ferrets, an animal
model of human influenza. H5N1 is highly lethal when it infects people,
but in the wild it is very difficult to transmit from one person to
another and is usually caught by direct contact with infected poultry.
The H1N1 flu virus from 2009Professor Kawaoka’s most recent published research was on reconstructing the 1918 flu virus, the genetic structure which was known from samples retrieved from the frozen corpses of its victims buried in the Arctic, from wild strains of bird flu isolated from ducks. He managed to do this, but the study was widely criticised as “stupid” and “irresponsible”.
Why does he want to do this work?
The
aim is to understand what is known as “gain of function”. What does it
take, genetically, for a virus to become more infectious or more lethal?
If we could understand this process then we would be in a better
position to develop drugs, vaccines and other measures to protect
ourselves from a sudden emergence of a new and deadly flu strain, or so
Professor Kawaoka has argued.
Does he have the support of other scientists?
There
is a big split within the scientific community over this kind of work.
Some flu specialists support it, provided it is done under strictly
regulated and controlled conditions. Others, mostly experts in
infectious diseases outside the flu community, are passionately opposed
to the work, claiming that the risks of an accidental (or even
deliberate) release that will cause a devastating pandemic are too great
to justify any practical benefits that may come out of the work.
Have there been any accidental releases from labs in the past?
Some
experts cite the unexpected emergence of a new H1N1 strain of flu in
1977, which spread globally over three decades, as an early example of a
flu virus being accidentally released from a lab. Genetic evidence
points to it having escaped from a lab in China or the Soviet Union.
There
are many examples of other infectious agents escaping from labs.
Smallpox virus escaped from Birmingham Medical School in 1978 and killed
a medical photographer, Janet Parker, the last person to die of
smallpox. Foot and mouth virus escaped in 2007 from a veterinary lab in
Surrey and in 2004 the SARS virus escaped from a high-containment lab in
Beijing, infecting nine people before it was stopped.
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