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The National Institutes of Health said Wednesday that a nonprofit group that has come under fire by some Congressional Republicans for its research collaborations in China did not immediately report the findings of studies on how well bat coronaviruses grew in mice.
In a letter to Kentucky Republican Representative James Comer, the NIH said the group, called the EcoHealth Alliance, has five days to submit all unpublished data from studies conducted under a 2014 multi-year grant for research. The organization’s grant was revoked in 2020 during President Trump’s litigation with China over the origins of the coronavirus under President Trump.
In recent months, NIH officials have denied the allegations—sometimes Fierce exchanges with Congressional Republicans – that coronaviruses studied with federal funds may have produced the pandemic. NIH director Dr. Francis Collins, a Declaration Wednesday night repeats this rebuttal.
“The naturally occurring bat coronaviruses studied under the NIH grant could not have been genetically far from SARS-CoV-2 and possibly caused the Covid-19 pandemic,” the statement said. “The claims to the contrary are clearly false.”
The EcoHealth Alliance has come under scrutiny for its collaboration on coronavirus research with researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the city where the pandemic started. The group did not immediately respond to phone and email messages on Thursday.
Some scientists argued that SARS-CoV-2 may have been the result of genetic engineering experiments or that it may have escaped from the laboratory in an accident. But direct evidence for these theories has yet to emerge. There are others saw these scenarios unlikelyinstead, pointing to a lot of evidence that people acquired the coronavirus in the early years. a natural spread from bats or an intermediate mammalian host.
The discussion drew attention to experiments conducted by the EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology with funding from the NIH.
Last monthThe Intercept, an online publication, has published 900 pages of material on NIH grants to the EcoHealth Alliance for research. The materials provided details on experiments designed to provide new insights into the risk of bat coronaviruses causing new pandemics.
In some of their experiments, the researchers isolated genes encoding a gene from bat coronaviruses. surface protein called spike. Coronaviruses use spike protein to attach to host cells, which is the first step in an infection. The spike protein locks onto a cell surface protein called the spike protein. ACE2.
According to the published materials, the researchers devised another bat virus, named afterward. WIV1, to carry spike proteins from other bat coronaviruses. They then ran experiments to see if engineered WIV1 viruses were better at binding to ACE2 on cells.
Such experiments flared up again years of debate About what kind of research is too dangerous to conduct, regardless of the insights it may provide. Experiments that can give viruses new abilities, sometimes called ‘gain-of-function’, have caused particular concern.
In 2019, the National Institutes of Health introduced the “P3CO framework.” Research on “advanced potential pandemic pathogens”. The NIH’s deputy chief executive, Dr. In a letter to Representative Comer, Lawrence Tabak wrote that the agency has determined that research proposed by the EcoHealth Alliance does not meet additional review criteria in this framework: it has been shown to infect humans.”
However, Dr. “Very carefully,” Tabak wrote, the agency added requirements for the EcoHealth Alliance to report specific results of experiments.
Dr. Tabak noted that in one line of research, researchers produced mice that had been genetically modified to produce the human version of the ACE2 protein in their cells. Infecting these animals with coronaviruses could potentially provide a more realistic idea of the risk of viruses infecting humans than using cell dishes alone.
The NIH has asked the EcoHealth Alliance to notify the agency if it turns out that engineered viruses grow 10 times faster or more than WIV1 without the new spike proteins.
In some experiments, it turned out that viruses grow rapidly.
Dr. “EcoHealth was unable to immediately report this finding, as the grant terms required,” Tabak wrote.
The NIH also gave Representative Comer a final progress report EcoHealth Alliance presented to the agency in August
In the report, researchers explain that they have found that WIV1 coronaviruses designed to carry spike proteins are more lethal. They killed the infected mice at higher rates than the WIV1 virus without spikes from other coronaviruses.
The NIH said filing was submitted late, about two years beyond the stated time limit for the 120-day grant from completion of the study. “Delayed reporting is a violation of the terms and conditions of the NIH grant award,” said Renate Myles, spokesperson for the agency.
Calling for more research into the origin of the pandemic, virologist Jesse Bloom of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center said the disclosures raise serious questions about the risks of studying animal-derived viruses, known as zoonotic viruses.
“In my view, some of this research on potential pandemic pathogens poses unacceptable risks,” he said. “In addition to asking whether EcoHealth complies with current regulations, we need to ask honestly what research needs to be done in the future to minimize the risks of pandemics, both zoonotic and laboratory-related.”
Some Congressional Republicans have pressed for more information for months, suggesting that the research was the source of the pandemic. “Thanks to the hard work of the Surveillance Committee Republicans, we now know that American taxpayers funded gain-of-function research in the Wuhan lab,” Representative Comer said in a statement.
Dr. Tabak’s letter made no mention of “gain-of-function” research.
Representative Comer also said that the chair of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Collins and Dr. Accusing Anthony Fauci of potentially misleading the committee, he promised that the GOP panel would “leave no stone unturned in its search for the truth for the American. People about how taxpayer dollars may have been associated with the start of this pandemic.”
Ms. Myles denied that EcoHealth’s experiments constituted gain-of-function research. He acknowledged that the findings in the mice were “somewhat unexpected.” However, Ms. Myles said the agency is reviewing the research described in EcoHealth’s progress report and that it will not trigger a review under stricter protocols for P3CO studies.
“The bat coronaviruses used in this research have not been shown to infect humans, and the experiments were not reasonably expected to increase infectivity or virulence in humans,” he said.
on Web page The National Institutes of Health, published Wednesday night, provided additional details about the viruses examined in the experiments, showing that they are not closely related to SARS-CoV-2.
Bats harbor thousands of types of coronavirus, and since the start of the pandemic, researchers have called his closest relatives SARS-CoV-2, which infects animals. They found several coronaviruses that were much more closely related to SARS-CoV-2 than WIV1.
Dr. The analysis “confirms that bat coronaviruses studied under the EcoHealth Alliance grant cannot be the source of the SARS-CoV-2 and Covid-19 pandemics,” Tabak wrote in the letter.
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