Scientists race for ‘holy grail’
Talks to the British experts working to prevent a deadly global pandemic.
Pale, sweaty and nauseous, Beth Emhoff embraces her son after returning home from a business trip in Hong Kong. Days later they are both dead. Within weeks, thousands in Emhoff’s town succumb to the same mystery illness. After months, the death toll reaches 2.5m.
That is the chilling plot of
a film offering a depiction of a global pandemic that experts claim is as realistic as it is terrifying.
‘‘It is a worst-case scenario,’’ says Professor John Edmunds of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. ‘‘But it’s not completely impossible ... One day we’ll probably get a flu virus that does something similar.’’
That day may come within our lifetimes, according to Bill Gates. The Microsoft founder is so concerned that he is investing US$12 million (NZ18m), alongside Google co-founder Larry Page, to help find a ‘‘holy grail’’ flu vaccine that can protect against every strain of the virus.
Gates’s research suggests that if a flu pandemic erupted today, around 33 million people would die within six months. One as severe as the 1918-19 Spanish flu, which killed up to 50 million people, would cost the global economy more than US$3 trillion.
Currently, there are an estimated billion cases each year, and around 300,000-600,000 are fatal.
Several companies in the US, such as Blue Water Vaccines and Versatope Therapeutics, have been tinkering with the proteins that protrude from the flu virus to create a universal cure. The hope is that by getting rid of the everchanging proteins, they can create a vaccine that responds to parts of the virus that remain the same in different strains. Some of the most advanced research, however, isn’t taking place in Silicon Valley, but deep in the heart of rural Oxfordshire. For the past five years, 10 scientists led by Oxford University’s Professor Jonathan Grimes have been working at the Diamond Light Source in Harwell’s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.
Covering the area of five football pitches, Diamond generates intense light beams 10 billion times brighter than the sun to probe matter down to the atomic scale. It’s been described as the UK’s biggest research machine.
‘‘With [Diamond] we can now do what would take us 24-48 hours in just 10 minutes,’’ says Grimes, who is using the synchrotron to model proteins within the flu virus. Inside the doughnutshaped facility, electrons are accelerated at light speed around a 550m-long vacuum chamber. They are then focused into a beam smaller than a single cell in diameter. When this beam passes through samples of the virus, it is able to probe deep into their finestructure – and scientists are now using the technique to better understand how flu mutates.
Existing flu vaccines only protect against a few strains of the disease and are between 10 to 60 per cent effective. The vaccine used by the NHS last winter only worked in a quarter of cases. They also take up to six months to create and produce in quantity – too long if a deadly pandemic hits.
The problem is one of genetic reshuffling that enables flu to outpace those battling it. ‘‘Flu has a segmented genome,’’ Grimes says. ‘‘If you have two different flu viruses in the same cell, these segments can swap over. So very quickly, you get new variants of flu emerging.’’
Grimes claims that although they can work to create a better flu vaccine, they may never be able to develop one that can protect against all strains. Professor Bryan Charleston, director of the Pirbright Institute, however, is more optimistic. ‘‘The problem looks more tractable than it used to,’’ he says. ‘‘We now have better technologies to understand the structure of proteins in the flu virus, or find particular regions of a protein that are shared between different flu strains.’’
Diamond’s synchrotron has proven invaluable, but it is the facility’s cryo-electron microscopes (cryo-EM) that have been credited for ‘‘revolutionising’’ research into vaccines. Cryo-EM works by lowering the temperature of samples to -200C to capture them in midmovement. This allows researchers to see individual atoms by magnifying viruses by a factor of a million.
‘‘The facility we have here is kind of a blueprint for the rest of the world,’’ says Alistair Siebert, a scientist at Diamond.
Together, the two techniques at the Diamond Light Source have already led to a major breakthrough. In September, Grimes said that his team had discovered the molecular structure of a protein that is vital for survival of the flu virus. They had, in essence, come a step closer to identifying a ‘‘kill-switch’’ for the disease.