Pitt lab working on coronavirus vaccine
In a way, COVID-19, the virus that has the world’s attention, is already in Pittsburgh.
Two weeks ago, a specially trained FedEx delivery team brought a well-packed box full of dry ice and small vials full of 50 million samples of SARS-CoV-2 — the virus that causes the disease COVID-19 — to the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Vaccine Research on Fifth Avenue in Oakland.
The delivery made the highly secure center — one of just 12 federally designated Regional Biocontainment Laboratories nationwide equipped to ramp up testing quickly — one of a couple of dozen labs in the U.S. to be given samples of the now notorious virus that has shut down countries, roiled economic markets and caused President Donald Trump to hold a news conference to try to calm the nation’s nerves Wednesday night.
The hope from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in giving Pitt and other laboratories the samples is that
they’ll more quickly get to a vaccine that can stop the incredibly infectious virus in its tracks.
Only one thing is certain about that goal, said Dr. Paul Duprex, director of Pitt’s Center for Vaccine Research: “Life has told me things like this take longer than you want.”
He confesses he put in a grant request a faint hope that his team might be able to make progress toward a cure in six to nine months, but, he said: “That would be very, very fast.”
And to put it mildly, he said, don’t expect results anything like was shown in the 1995 movie “Outbreak,” where a vaccine is created and distributed globally seemingly in a matter of weeks.
“It doesn’t happen like that,” he said with a laugh.
Dr. Duprex, an immigrant from Northern Ireland and international expert on viruses like COVID-19 that jump from animals to humans, was hired just over a year ago. He was lured to Pitt with his entire team and a long list of federal grants from Boston University, where he headed one of the only higher-level laboratories in the country.
Boston University’s lab, which is one of just two Bio Safety Level 4 labs in the country, is able to handle the most noxious, foreign viruses for which no vaccine is available, such as the disease that causes Ebola.
Pitt’s highest-level lab is Bio Safety Level 3. It deals with domestic viruses that have no vaccine and with diseases like the H5N1 avian flu virus and Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome virus, known as MERS.
But the BU lab had a fractured relationship with its residential neighbors who were fearful of what could happen if a disease like Ebola somehow escaped into the community.
Dr. Duprex wants to avoid that here and wants the Pittsburgh community to know every precaution is taken in the lab named after him.
“We’re in the community. We have to explain what we’re doing in our community,” he said. “We don’t want to make people afraid of what we’re doing.
“I want people to be proud of what we’re doing.”
The kind of pride he hopes he can invoke in the region is omnipresent in the building where he works. During a tour Thursday of his lab, Dr. Duprex stopped to point out a poster-sized, black-and-white photo of Dr. Jonas Salk, who discovered the polio vaccine while working at Pitt in 1953.
Among other titles Pitt bestowed on Dr. Duprex when it lured him from BU was to name him the Jonas Salk Chair of Vaccine Research.
Just like Salk, he said, before he or anyone can begin claiming success, “we have to do the basic science first. And that’s hard.”
The first step, once his lab received the samples from the CDC, was to figure out how to grow them into the actual virus.
He was told early on by a friend and colleague in the field that it takes 66 hours for the virus to be grown once it starts — “And you can’t speed that up.”
But now, the lab has taken those original 50 million samples and managed to turn them into billions of SARS-CoV-2 using cells from monkeys as the host. The process is ongoing.
That might sound like a lot of virus samples, Dr. Duprex said, but his team still has to be careful with them as the team tries to move on to the next phase: Activating the virus in an animal host.
“I don’t want to have to call up the CDC and say, ‘Could I have more because we didn’t know what we were doing.’ That isn’t going to happen. You only get credibility by being credible,” he said.
Though researchers can make more samples from existing samples, that becomes less and less valuable with each new generation of the virus, Dr. Duprex said, because the virus begins to evolve and adapt.
“We want to keep [working] with early pathogen stocks,” he said. “The closer you stay to what it was when it came from a person, it’s a way of de-risking from genetic changes” in the virus.
The university has already seeded some of the early work the lab will undertake with an initial $200,000. But Dr. Duprex is already applying for grants to fund work toward, hopefully, creation of a vaccine.
Taking security seriously
The lab, located in the Biomedical Science Tower on the Pitt campus, has multiple levels of security to prevent the various viruses the researchers work with from escaping.
All the doors in and out of, and even within, the labs are secure — some requiring an electronic card entry, others a thumbprint.
Just to be allowed to view a Level 3 lab from outside a window looking in, reporters and other visitors have to go through a 15-minute instructional class explaining that they will not be allowed outside the sight of a trained staff member.
The Level 3 lab itself is in a room in the central part of the building, with an air filter system that collects and clears the air twice with specially made filters designed to collect even virus-sized particulates before it is released outside the building.
Employees who work inside the labs wear full gowns, gloves and helmets that filter clean air inside the helmets while they work with the viruses.
Matt Dunn and Theron Gilliland, researchers who have done the hands-on work with SARS-CoV-2, talked with reporters Thursday via walkie talkies because the rooms are also soundproof to the outside hallway.
Though both of them were well aware of the infamy of the virus they were working with, it didn’t cause any extra concern for them.
“This is business as usual for us,” Mr. Dunn said. “But we are pleased to contribute.”
About the only difference for them in their daily work,
Mr. Gilliland said, was that they had to use a different disinfectant that is specifically designed to kill SARSCoV-2.
At one point during the interview, Mr. Dunn brought to the window the covered, small plastic container that held the now-dead, purplecolored, first plaque assay they grew of the SARS-CoV-2 virus — a container they keep in their lab.
Dr. Duprex said there was never a question about keeping the container with the virus, which is now harmless.
“That’s a little bit of our history, right?” he said.
Working together
Ideally, with now dozens of labs in the U.S. and dozens more around the world all scrambling to find a vaccine for this disease, which kills about 2% of people who get it, the labs would all share what they learn when they learn it.
That does not always happen, much to Dr. Duprex’s regret.
“We’re not obliged” to share information, he said. “But it’s the right thing to do. It doesn’t have to be a competition.”
“Competition is super important. Because competition drives innovation,” he said. “But competition in the face of an outbreak that’s killed over 2,500 people with a pathogen we don’t understand is just foolish. It gets back to what’s right.”