LANL, UCLA study monitoring of pandemics
6/12/2009
The building blocks for a massive outbreak could be hiding anywhere, just waiting to come together inside the bodies of birds, pigs or humans, among the myriad other creatures out there.
Keeping an eye on disease risk in the billions of animals we rely on daily for food and other products is a daunting task at best, but scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the University of California, Los Angeles, are developing a new strategy that could make the task much easier.
They've developed a piece of equipment that can automatically determine the genetic sequence of viruses much faster than anything like it. And they're setting up a lab at UCLA that will integrate with software and technology from LANL to reach around the globe and analyze emerging diseases in a wide range of creatures, creators of the project said.
"When something breaks out we want to know many things about it," said Tony Beugelsdijk, leader of the high throughput laboratory network at LANL, which developed the equipment and will work on the software.
In an emerging threat, scientists and medical workers need to know about the character of the disease, where it came from, how deadly it is, if it's manmade — and they need to try to track where it's traveling in human populations, said Scott Layne, a former LANL scientist and a professor of epidemiology at the UCLA School of Public Health.
"There are two things that make a pandemic, and a third thing that makes a bad pandemic," Layne said. "The first two are that it has to be transmissible from person to person and that it has to be something new to the human immune system so that it has no defense against it. The third bad thing is if the virus is deadly."
Viruses like swine flu, which has killed 27 people across the United States but isn't considered particularly deadly yet, can mutate rapidly into much more hazardous forms. And so far, scientists have had a hard time trying to predict how they might mutate or what the potential for deadly mutations really is, Layne said.
"In the case of swine flu, we know we're in a hurricane, but we just don't know what class it will become," Layne said. "Right now we're in a class one hurricane, but we don't know if we're a few mutations away from a class five hurricane."
The key to figuring out how deadly a disease might become lies in its genetic history, and the way to find that is through monitoring and analysis of viruses in animals and humans before the diseases mutate or spread, Beugelsdijk said.
"We're looking at basic screening," Beugelsdijk said. "In things like avian samples we can scan random samples for the flu, then look to see if our vaccines would work on those strains. We want to collect isolates from around the world and start to map what's happening."
The normal mode of the project will be to research and collect information about viruses and diseases and to build a body of data that scientists can use to better understand them, Beugelsdijk said.
One of the sources for data right now is a program the partners are working on with the National Institutes of Health. NIH is doing field surveillance of bird flyways around the world and the agency is collecting about 50,000 bird DNA samples a year, which can be analyzed at the lab, Beugelsdijk said.
Eventually LANL and UCLA hope to spread the sequencing technology and collection efforts across the United States and the world, by setting up labs in several states and countries and developing inexpensive field equipment so it's easier to get samples from a wide range of animals, including pigs and wild game, the scientists said.
In normal research mode, beyond testing animal strains, the equipment will also likely test about 10,000 human influenza virus strains per year, which is something of a remarkable accomplishment, Layne said.
"We, in all of human history, have only analyzed between 3,000 and 4,000 viruses," Layne said.
Outside of research mode, the lab and software can also be used in emergency mode during a pandemic, the two scientists said.
In that case, the equipment can test 10,000 samples a day, Layne said.
"That is a much higher capacity than other labs have across the United States," he said.
Right now, the $1.7 million sequencing device, which was built to specifications by Agilent Technologies, is at LANL for final testing and verification.
When that's done, the machine will travel to the new UCLA lab, which is a 6,300-square-foot biosafety level three facility that should be finished by the end of June or early July, Layne said.
Once it's set up, the two agencies will continue to work together on sampling and software that will help the project grow, they said.
Funding for the effort so far on the lab side has come mostly through a four-year $21 million Department of Defense grant, which the lab is halfway through, Beugelsdijk said.
The state of California also spent about $9 million on the UCLA lab, he said.
Fully developing the program, however, will require more funding. The partners hope to secure between $50 million and $70 million for the next stage, Beugelsdijk said.
"We're exploring a number of sources right now," he said.
Realistically the lab and UCLA are about five to 10 years away from having a fully developed global monitoring and research network, but the effort is well worth it, and could save millions of lives in the long run, Layne said.
"Eventually we'll be able to look at a developing disease and say based on the information we've got that 'this looks threatening' or 'this doesn't look threatening' in a profound way," Layne said. "Without this lab, though, we're a gazillion years away from that."
Contact Sue Vorenberg at svorenberg@sfnewmexican.com.