THE RESEARCH:
Northwestern professor leading team to stop virus.
As the mysterious coronavirus spreads — killing at least 56 people in China and prompting U.S. health officials to screen thousands for signs of the disease — a Northwestern University professor is leading a multipronged effort to try to stop it in its tracks.
Karla Satchell, a professor of microbiology-immunology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, is leading a team of U.S. and Canadian researchers to examine the atomic structure of the virus, which originated in Wuhan, China, in the Hubei province. Satchell leads the Center for Structural Genomics of Infectious Diseases, a consortium of nine labs at eight schools collaborating on this effort.
Other institutions in the consortium are University of Chicago, Purdue University, Washington University, University of Virginia, University of Calgary, UT Southwestern Medical Center and Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute in San Diego.
Satchell said the consortium, in place since 2007, functions as a sort of rapid response research operation that can mobilize immediately to quickly find solutions for public health emergencies.
“We are here specifically for this,” Satchell said in an interview Friday. “If there’s a crisis like this, the last thing you want is for the (National Institutes of Health) to say, let’s put out a call for grants and take seven months to review them. We’re here and we have entirely trained staff. We’re able to pivot almost immediately to respond.”
The team is mapping out the proteins of the virus with the aim of finding a weak spot where medication can intervene and stop the virus from replicating in humans. To do that, they are cloning the virus proteins and growing them in crystal form in small ice cube-like trays. The scientists then can use a powerful X-ray beam to view the proteins down to the atomic level.
Satchell said they are focusing specifically on 12 of the 28 proteins in the virus.
Though coronavirus may be new to the general public, but Satchell said infectious disease researchers at the center already had projects in place to better understand the proteins of similar viruses. Both SARS and MERS are types of coronaviruses, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The proteins in this new virus are highly similar to those of SARS, Satchell said.
That meant researchers quickly could compare and contrast the coronavirus with similar ones, and figure out what drugs they had on hand to test against it, Satchell said.
“We’re doing really beautiful science on behalf of the infectious disease community every day, but when something like this happens, all that capacity is already preexisting,” Satchell said.
That similarity, however, does not necessarily mean the same medications work on both. Andrew Mesecar, a biochemistry professor at Purdue, is developing the specific oral medicine and vaccines to combat it.
The consortium has done this type of work before, Satchell said, most notably during recent Zika virus outbreaks starting in 2013.
Satchell said other groups of researchers throughout the world are doing similar work on coronavirus, publicly posting papers and entering information into databases for other researchers to quickly access.
“One of the things that’s really unique in this is just how open all the science is,” Satchell said. “It allows many different minds to contribute to that.”