Daniel Becker, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Department of Biology in the Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oklahoma, is joining a global team of scientists as co-lead investigator for a new National Science Foundation-funded institute designed to advance research and education around viral emergence – the process of viruses jumping from animals to humans.
The Verena (Viral Emergence Research Initiative) Biology Integration Institute aims to advance a cross-disciplinary research agenda that targets significant sources of emerging infectious diseases. The institute, based at Georgetown University’s Center for Global Health Science and Security, will also train scientists at all career stages in the science of the host-virus network, as well as core scientific skills in data fluency and boundary spanning, creating the next generation of viral emergence-focused researchers.
Becker will lead a particular foci of work within the institute – the coevolution of host immunity and the global virome. This component will study the evolutionary forces that have shaped the immune systems of virus hosts and their vectors, focusing especially on bats and mosquitoes. Bats can carry some human viruses without showing disease, and this is thought to stem from special aspects of their immune system as flying mammals. Using samples collected around the world, Becker’s team will develop a comprehensive database of bat immune systems, analyze differences that stem from bat ecology and evolutionary history, and ask how this variation in their immune systems has then shaped virus evolution, diversity and emergence risk.
“This project lets us take a truly global perspective on studying the immune systems of animals that can carry zoonotic viruses,” said Becker. “By studying how very different bats cope with these pathogens, we hope to build better models to predict where and from what species new viruses could arise. Ultimately, those forecasts could help us strategically minimize virus jumps to humans and also reduce negative interactions between wildlife and people.”
The work of Becker and his team is critical to the overall success of the project.
“The days of ‘quiet periods’ between epidemics are over – from this point on, we’re headed from COVID-19 straight into monkeypox, into the next public health crisis,” said Georgetown’s Colin Carlson, Ph.D., director of the institute and co-founder of Verena. "Our goal is to build the data and tools we need to know what's coming tomorrow - and maybe, actually, be ready next time."
In addition to Becker and Carlson, other grant co-lead investigators include Stephanie Seifert, Ph.D., Washington State University; Sadie Ryan, Ph.D., University of Florida; and Cynthia Wei, Ph.D., Georgetown University. The institute also includes nine additional senior researchers.
The researchers began developing their approach six months before the pandemic started – building datasets, running experiments and applying artificial intelligence, all in concert, to understand the rules of cross-species transmission.
Over the first five years, the NSF-funded institute will provide new insights into the evolution of bats’ unique immune systems, and – with additional exploratory work on mosquito vectors of disease – will lay the foundation to apply innovative methods across the vertebrate and invertebrate global virome. In addition, the predictive work undertaken by the team will spark broad advances in machine learning and computational biology. The open data infrastructure being developed – including a universal, public database for wildlife disease surveillance – will broaden the horizons of quantitative work in disease ecology at large.
###
National Science Foundation “BII: Predicting the global host-virus network from molecular foundations” - (2213854)
