Houston Methodist prepares for next pandemic as part of national NIH-funded consortium

The question isn’t if, but when, the next pandemic will hit. Research and observation have identified strong potential for the next pandemic-causing virus to come from one or more of five different virus families. Houston Methodist scientists will focus on three of these as part of a national research consortium funded by the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). The consortium is led by Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. 

Scientists from the Houston Methodist Research Institute will work to develop efficacious vaccines and therapeutic antibodies for viruses in the Nairoviridae, Hantaviridae and Paramyxoviridae families. The potential exists for a virus member in one or all of these families to be the cause of the next major pandemic. The specific viruses in these families that will be looked at by Houston Methodist researchers include: 

• Nairoviruses (primarily caused by ticks) 
• Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever 
• Hazara virus 
• Andes
• Hantaviruses (caused by exposure to urine, saliva or droppings of infected rodents) 
• Sin Nombre
• Hantaan virus 
• Paramyxoviruses (respiratory viruses that occur in animals and humans spread through respiratory droplets or direct contact)  
• Menangle
• Tioman
• Sosuga
• Nipah virus 

“To prepare for potential outbreaks of these target viruses, we will investigate the antigenic determinants of these viruses, similar to what was done with the years of research into coronaviruses that led to vaccine developers being able to rapidly provide solutions to the SARS-CoV-2 virus,” said Jimmy D. Gollihar, Ph.D., one of PROVIDENT’s co-principal investigators and head of the Antibody Discovery & Accelerated Protein Therapeutics (ADAPT) laboratory at the Houston Methodist Research Institute. “We propose to target viruses within these families by manufacturing and testing monoclonal antibodies and RNA vaccines that can effectively treat and prevent disease caused by these viruses. Our work will provide the foundational knowledge to develop effective medical countermeasures in response to a potential outbreak and pandemic.” 

Gollihar will discover and engineer monoclonal antibodies to these viruses, as well as contribute to the generation of gene sequences encoding stabilized viral antigens for potential mRNA vaccines through his ADAPT lab, which is a modern synthetic biology and protein engineering lab. His team will also collaborate with the RNA Core, led by John P. Cooke, M.D., Ph.D., medical director of the Center for RNA Therapeutics, to construct, encapsulate and validate them. Working with Cooke on this will be Francesca Taraballi, Ph.D., who is the director for the Center for Musculoskeletal Regeneration and works closely as a faculty member in the Center for RNA Therapeutics. She will provide a nanoscale drug delivery platform that will encapsulate the vaccines in lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) for testing and validation by the other investigators. 

The use of mRNA encapsulated in LNPs was also something that greatly enhanced the ability of vaccine developers during the COVID-19 pandemic to rapidly provide the public with an effective vaccine against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. 

Led by Kartik Chandran, Ph.D., at Albert Einstein College of Medicine under a five-year grant of $14 million per year (award number 1U19AI181977-01), the PROVIDENT (Prepositioning Optimized Strategies for Vaccines and Immunotherapeutics Against Diverse Emerging Infectious Threats) consortium is part of the Research and Development of Vaccines and Monoclonal Antibodies for Pandemic Preparedness (ReVAMPP) Network, focusing its research efforts on representative pathogens from virus families known to infect humans. By studying and developing solutions for these high-priority pathogens with the potential to cause deadly diseases, the scientists in the PROVIDENT consortium will build a knowledge base with the potential to be applied to other related viruses. 

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