Sweeping study of human viruses by researchers including UTHealth Houston funded with $20M from NIH

Unlocking knowledge about the vast and varied collection of viruses that live in and on our bodies is the goal of a $20 million grant from the Common Fund of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to researchers, including a team at UTHealth Houston.

Susan Fisher-Hoch, MD, professor of epidemiology at UTHealth Houston School of Public Health in Brownsville, is one of four principal investigators. She will be collaborating with fellow investigators at lead institution Vanderbilt University Medical Center and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The funding will create the Vanderbilt-coordinated Virus Characterization Center.

Under the Human Virome Program, launched last year by the NIH Common Fund, the NIH anticipates funding five research centers seeking to characterize the human virome across the lifespan through diverse, longitudinal research cohorts across the U.S. Existing research has focused on the small number of viruses that cause illness. The centers will explore the many other understudied viruses that make up a healthy human virome and are not associated with a known or sudden disease.

One of the cohorts in the program is the Cameron County Hispanic Cohort (CCHC), established more than 20 years ago by Fisher-Hoch and Joseph McCormick, MD, the James J. Steele, DVM Professor at the School of Public Health in Brownsville, which lies on the Texas-Mexico border. The CCHC now has more than 5,000 participants ages 8-90 from low-income Hispanic/Latino households. The virome project will include healthy individuals: 1,750 with archived biosamples spanning up to two decades, and 500 who will provide prospective samples over approximately four years.

“This is a great honor for us at the School of Public Health in Brownsville and the entire university,” said Fisher-Hoch, whose team received $5 million in funding. “The high level of phenotyping and the multi-omic platform of our cohort will provide an exceptional ability to detect an effect by viruses on human health and disease. We also want to recognize the cohort participants from our community who generously worked with us to achieve this award. This recognition of the critical science that our Hispanic/Latino cohort brings is a great reward for all.”

Multi-omics refers to the research incorporation of data from different “omics,” which together contribute to the molecular mechanisms of health and disease, such as genomics, epigenomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics. The School of Public Health in Brownsville was chosen as one of six sites of the NIH’s Multi-omics for Health and Disease Consortium.

The other cohort included in the Vanderbilt-coordinated Virus Characterization Center is Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Childhood Allergy and the Neonatal Environment – Viruses study cohort, a study that consists of about 200 children followed from birth through age 5.

The Vanderbilt-coordinated Virus Characterization Center will work in concert with research teams at other institutions with the goal of uncovering the interactions between the human host and the virome and developing tools, models, and methods to capture and describe the human virome.

“Human viruses are largely understudied, with most research historically focusing only on pathogenic viruses that cause obvious clinical disease, while the vast majority of viruses that reside in us without causing disease remain poorly understood,” said Suman Das, PhD, a principal investigator and research associate professor of medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Das also serves as the administrative lead for the five-year grant.

The other two lead investigators are cardiologist Ravi Shah, MD, professor of medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and epidemiologist Kari North, PhD, from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Researchers will investigate whether and how nonpathogenic viruses likely play important roles in human health and disease — similar to how the study of the human microbiome revealed important roles for bacteria.

Other areas of investigation are how viral persistence and integration into the human genome, even without symptoms, may significantly impact human phenotypes and health outcomes over time, and if there are important differences in host responses to the ambient virome that drive differences in human phenotypes.

Researchers said understanding the healthy human virome could lead to discovery of novel biomarkers for health and disease and new therapeutic approaches.

A premise central to the Human Virome Program is that the virome interacts significantly not only with the host immune system but also with the human microbiome. Key research methods used by the Vanderbilt-coordinated Virus Characterization Center will include whole metagenomic sequencing to capture DNA viruses, whole metatranscriptomic sequencing to assess RNA viruses, viral isolation and tropism studies (revealing tissue preferences of viruses), and various methods to characterize host response, such as host genomic integration analysis, analysis of inflammatory state, and mucosal response studies.

The new center is supported by NIH grant U54-AG089326.