Saudi Arabian doctors scrambled last month to treat a third person who had fallen ill from a new strain of coronavirus that emerged earlier this year in the Middle East. The man survived with the help of supportive care from his physicians, but one of the other two patients who fell victim to the mysterious virus—a pathogen that resembles the coronavirus responsible for severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)—was not so fortunate.
{credit}CDC{/credit}
These recent cases drive home an all too stark reality: a decade on from the SARS outbreak that killed close to 800 people worldwide, scientists still have no proven effective vaccines or drugs that can stop the spread of SARS or SARS-like viruses, let alone mitigate their symptoms. Now, to make matters worse in the face of an emerging threat, a new reclassification of the bioterrorism risk posed by SARS may hamper efforts at novel medical strategies.
“Many labs are going to destroy their [SARS] virus instead of continue to work on it because the burden of regulation is quite high,” says Rachel Roper, a microbiologist at East Carolina University Brody School of Medicine in Greenville, North Carolina.
Roper has worked with SARS since the global pandemic ten years ago. She led the team that sequenced the virus’s genome, and, more recently, she and her colleagues created two experimental vaccines: a whole, killed SARS virus shot and an adenovirus-based vector carrying key SARS structural proteins. Both products elicited some degree of immune response and partially prevented viral replication in mice and ferrets. However, the protection was incomplete.
She had been working to improve both strategies and was already struggling with how she would advance a lead candidate into the clinic in the absence of any natural human SARS challenge against which to test it. Then, on 5 October, the US government announced plans to add SARS to its list of select agents. This reclassification, which goes into effect on 4 December, requires labs to now obtain additional licenses and adhere to stricter levels of biosafety and biosecurity to conduct any experiments with the virus. Although Roper recognizes that the move was made in the interest of protecting public health, for her this was the last straw. She says she no longer plans to work on SARS, opting to destroy her live virus instead of seeking certification for her lab.