CORONAVIRUS - 2020

[DarthYoda]

"Supplementary Materials for The Global Virome Project":
Published 23 February 2018

Despite the challenges of countermeasure development, there are a number of ways that the GVP could rapidly and feasibly improve efforts to pre-empt zoonotic viral emergence, more rapidly diagnose cases, and intervene earlier in outbreaks: 1) Greater diversity of viral reagents for countermeasure development. Having the sequence data for thousands, rather than a few, viruses from a single family could enhance our understanding of the efficacy of novel therapeutics, vaccines or other countermeasures to a wider range of targets.

For example, following the emergence of SARS-CoV, a large number of diverse related coronaviruses has been discovered from bats, including a group closely related to SARS - the bat SARS-like coronaviruses (SL-CoVs).

The spike proteins of a number of recently-discovered SL-CoVs have ability to bind to the human receptor for SARS-CoV, and to infect and replicate SARS-like disease in mice when inserted into a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone.

However, both a vaccine and monoclonal therapy that reduces SARS-CoV infection in this model failed to neutralize and protect from infection with the SL-CoV chimera. Thus, expanding our knowledge of the diversity of related SL-CoVs under a GVP program may provide more effective testing protocols for SARS therapeutics and prophylactics;

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/suppl/2018/02/21/359.6378.872.DC1/aap7463-Carroll-SM.pdf