Reassembled virus raises ethics questions
Doctors wonder if previously extinct horsepox requires new regulations
Scientists in Canada have used commercially available genetic material to piece together the extinct horsepox virus, a cousin of the smallpox virus that killed as many as a billion human beings before being eradicated.
The laboratory achievement was reported Thursday in a news article in the journal Science.
The lead researcher in Canada, David Evans, a professor at the University of Alberta, told The Washington Post that his efforts are aimed at developing vaccines and cancer treatments. There is nothing dangerous about the synthetic horsepox virus, which is not harmful to humans.
He has not yet published his findings in a scientific journal — how to report this kind of research is necessarily fraught for the editors of such journals — but he did discuss them at a meeting on smallpox research last November at the World Health Organization in Geneva. A report on the meeting published by the WHO noted that Evans had received approval from regulatory authorities for his work, but the report added that those authorities may not have fully appreciated the need for regulation of the steps involved in synthesizing a virulent horse pathogen.
Evans said he has applied for a patent and is collaborating with a commercial company, Tonix Pharmaceuticals. In a news release, Tonix said it hopes to use horsepox virus to develop a new vaccine for smallpox that is safer than the one currently available, which can have serious side effects.
Evans said he was not trying to prove a point, but he acknowledged that he has long argued that it would be possible to synthesize a pox virus through laboratory techniques.
Smallpox, the deadliest disease in human history, was formally declared eradicated in 1980. Government officials and virologists have long debated whether to destroy the existing samples of smallpox kept under close guard at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as in government facilities in Russia. One argument against doing so, advanced by Evans and others, is that destroying the known stocks would not conclusively get rid of smallpox, because there could be unknown caches of the virus hidden somewhere, and that, in any case, modern techniques would be able to synthesize the virus based on already published genetic sequences.
Evans's experiment, according to Science, required about $100,000, a relatively modest sum, and used commercially available genetic material. Companies sell scraps of cloned DNA that scientists stitch together. Laws restrict access to smallpox genes, however, and Evans said that even a highly credentialed researcher would not be able to obtain such material: "You'd probably get a call from the FBI if you tried."
Evans said the creation of synthetic horsepox "isn't trivially easy." He said he was not seeking publicity and wished that news organizations would not make a "fuss" about his work.
"Whether you can make the virus, or whether there are these hidden stocks of virus, doesn't change the fact that in the case of smallpox, we have to be prepared for it," he said. "I don't know whether the risk has gone up or not. The fact we're talking about it is to some extent increasing the risk."
Tom Frieden, former head of the CDC, said the breakthrough was not surprising but probably makes the debate over destroying the existing smallpox stockpiles less relevant. He said it highlights the need to monitor more closely "dual-use" experiments — research that could be used either for protective purposes or, in theory, to create a deadly pathogen.
Frieden said this research should spur improvements in laboratory safety to prevent the accidental release of microbes — something that has happened a number of times in American facilities and others around the world. The broader story here, Frieden said, is that the U.S. and other countries need to be prepared for emerging pathogens, which can and will appear naturally — no laboratory necessary. That sentiment was echoed by Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
"The danger of naturally evolving microbes, like Zika, like pandemic influenza, like Ebola, that naturally evolve, are much more of a threat to civilization than the possibility that someone might be able to synthesize a microbe," Fauci told The Washington Post. "People should concentrate on what we've been talking about for a long time: getting ourselves prepared for the natural emergence in nature of microbes that could threaten us."
Smallpox vaccination programs ceased several decades ago after the smallpox virus stopped circulating widely. Today, a majority of Americans have never been vaccinated against smallpox.