How science and innovation can mitigate future pandemics
Scientific tools to stem a viral pandemic
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Surveillance
Scientists are developing and using genomic tools to detect the presence of pathogens and alert public health officials of emerging threats. This includes monitoring wastewater, patients, livestock and wildlife. Continuous genomic surveillance helps to monitor for mutations that might result in variants of viruses that are significantly harmful—for example, because they’re able to spread more quickly or cause more severe disease.
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Diagnostics
Developing rapid tests to diagnose infections arms patients and healthcare providers with vital information to manage their health. Digital technologies such as activity trackers have also been shown to detect the onset of viral disease.
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Therapeutics
Antivirals are medicines used to treat viral infections. Having antivirals from the start of a pandemic is critical to help limit morbidity and mortality. Further, these medicines can help limit the spread of a disease and buy time until effective vaccines are developed and distributed. Those that are broad spectrum and long acting are especially useful for disease prevention.
Antivirals can help in three key areas: preventing infection; slowing the replication of the virus once infected; and minimizing bodily damage caused by an infection.
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Vaccines
As the world learned from COVID-19, vaccines are critical to help protect people, particularly vulnerable populations, from contracting the disease or developing a severe case of the disease. The quest to develop universal vaccines can help protect people from large groups of viruses. For example, a universal flu vaccine or universal coronavirus vaccine could confer long-lasting protection against many variants of a virus.
H5N1
The next potential threat
After the COVID-19 pandemic, another virus threatens to reach pandemic potential: the H5N1 bird flu. To date, the virus has been limited to animal-to-human transmission with mostly mild symptoms, but if it mutates and becomes transmissible among humans, it could have globally devastating effects worldwide. Testing and developing combination antivirals are just two ways scientists are aiming to prepare for a possible flu pandemic.
Listen to Arnab Chatterjee, PhD, share more about the search for antivirals to mitigate a potential flu pandemic.
Global efforts to mitigate viral threats
Data sharing and international collaboration
The open exchange of scientific information is crucial to gather critical data around the epidemiology, pathology and treatment of a disease as quickly as possible.
Capacity strengthening
By augmenting global supply chains and healthcare infrastructures, diagnostics, therapeutics, vaccines and surveillance tools can reach everyone who needs them.
Science and innovation
Accelerating scientific discovery that leverages the latest technologies can improve detection, treatment and prevention.
Funding
Long-term funding of basic and translational science as well as healthcare infrastructure helps ensure rapid responses to emerging threats.
Communication and advocacy
Strengthening communication between public health officials, scientists and society facilitates timely and accurate information to inform individual health decisions.
Education
Preparing the next generation of scientists and leaders worldwide to combat viral threats mitigates preventable diseases in the future.
Finding antivirals and combination compounds to slow drug resistance
Scripps Research and collaborators are searching for combination drugs to slow down replication of the H5N1 virus once infected. This strategy minimizes the risk of drug resistance, a lesson learned from the growing resistance to single-agent therapies by seasonal flu. Influenza becomes drug resistant relatively quickly, so currently available drugs to treat flu may become ineffective during a pandemic.
Researchers are using ReFRAME, the world’s leading collection of known drugs housed at Scripps Research’s Calibr-Skaggs Institute for Innovative Medicines, to uncover dozens of promising compounds that treat influenza effectively in animal models and are likely safe in humans. By screening key targets in the database (which comprises 14,000 compounds that have been approved by the FDA for other diseases or have been extensively tested for human safety), scientists are moving closer to the goal of finding direct-acting molecules that will reduce the time it takes for a new pandemic flu virus to become resistant to therapies.
Keeping an eye on the virus
Experts in genomic surveillance are analyzing sequence data to understand the spread and transmission dynamics of various pathogens including Lassa, Ebola, mpox and the current H5N1 outbreak. By developing computational tools to help interpret viral genomic data, scientists are monitoring for the emergence of potentially harmful variants and helping guide public health response efforts locally, nationally and globally for a wide range of viral threats.
Leveraging wearable technology
Scientists at the Scripps Research Translational Institute have shown how physiological data obtained from activity trackers and smartwatches can be used to detect the early onset of viral illnesses such as COVID-19 and influenza, even before symptoms manifest. Wearable technology represents a powerful addition to the disease detection toolkit and one that could complement conventional screening efforts in those regions of the world where these types of technologies are ubiquitous.
Universal vaccines for influenza and more
Scripps Research scientists are developing “universal vaccines,” which could protect against many variants of a given virus, and potentially against entire virus families. To accomplish this, researchers are identifying specific sites that are vital to the virus’ survival, and then using powerful technologies to identify antibodies that target these sites. Scientists are working to make such vaccines for influenza and coronavirus, which could ward of these viruses for the better part of a lifetime.
