Post by icemandios on May 9, 2023 18:01:21 GMT
NIH reinstates grant for controversial coronavirus research
Max Kozlov
Research organization EcoHealth Alliance plans to investigate coronaviruses in bats.Milehightraveller/Getty
The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has reinstated a grant to a highly scrutinized research organization that studies bat coronaviruses — but the agency has placed severeal stipulations on the scope of the research and on the organization’s accounting practices.
The move caps a years-long saga that has thrust the EcoHealth Alliance, a small non-profit organization in New York City, into the political fray for its collaborations with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China. In April 2020, after then-US-president Donald Trump hinted that SARS-CoV-2 originated in a WIV laboratory, the NIH terminated EcoHealth’s grant. Its goal was to study how coronaviruses, such as SARS-CoV-2, jump from bats to humans. A few months later, the NIH reinstated and immediately suspended the award until certain conditions were met that, at the time, EcoHealth said were impossible to complete.
The shifting sands of ‘gain-of-function’ research
Researchers who spoke to Nature applaud the renewal, adding that this type of research is essential to avert the next pandemic. They claim that the NIH’s termination and subsequent suspension were politically motivated, and that, although long overdue, this renewal ends — for now — a drama-filled exchange between the agency and EcoHealth.
“It’s about goddam time,” says Gerald Keusch, associate director of the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratory Institute at Boston University in Massachusetts, who organized researchers to push back against EcoHealth’s grant termination in 2020. “The integrity of science requires a barrier against political interference,” he says.
The NIH “routinely considers processes and measures for strengthening [its] oversight over federal funds” and has been working with EcoHealth to strengthen its “administrative processes to meet NIH’s expectations”, says Amanda Fine, a spokesperson for the NIH.
Although the organization will now be able to continue its bat coronavirus research for the first time since the saga began, the NIH placed an extensive list of restrictions on the four-year, US$2.9-million award. None of the researchers who spoke to Nature had ever seen a grant with so many stipulations.
Among other things, EcoHealth is specifically forbidden from performing any in-country research in China, including with the WIV, or collecting any new samples from vertebrates — such as bats. The revised grant also mandates greater scrutiny of EcoHealth’s finances and accounting practices, driven in part by a federal watchdog report, released in January, finding that EcoHealth had misreported about $90,000 in expenses. The report also faulted the NIH for improperly terminating EcoHealth’s grant.
In addition, EcoHealth will be forbidden from performing any work that is deemed by the NIH’s parent organization, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), to have the potential to enhance the virulence or transmission of a virus. This restriction stems, in part, from criticism that research done at WIV and funded by an EcoHealth subaward qualified as ‘gain of function’ research.
Congressional Republicans have alleged that this research, which involved attaching spike proteins from wild bat coronaviruses to an unrelated virus to determine whether the wild pathogens could infect human airway cells, should have undergone HHS review. Anthony Fauci, then-director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease, has said the agency concluded that these experiments did not meet the bar to undergo such review, and noted that the WIV did not intend to enhance the viruses.
Virologists say this type of research is essential for developing vaccines and therapeutics against emerging pathogens and for understanding how likely a pathogen is to spark a pandemic. The NIH and HHS have been finalizing guidance that will probably tighten the oversight of such research in the United States.
“I don’t know if any other single grantee from NIH has been subjected to this level of oversight,” says Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance. Yet he is “positive and optimistic” about the grant restart, despite all the restrictions. A key priority for the newly released funds will be analysing nearly 300 partial or complete genomes of SARS-related coronaviruses from samples that the organization collected before the funding halt, he says.
These restrictions seem reasonable, in light of the enormous public attention to and scrutiny of gain-of-function research, says Lawrence Gostin, a health-law and policy specialist at Georgetown University in Washington DC. Still, Gostin says he is surprised the agency restarted its funding for EcoHealth, given that it has been the “third rail of politics” the last few years.
Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, says she is pleasantly surprised to see the grant renewed, but worries about the “terrible precedent” that the NIH set by “arbitrarily” terminating an award on the basis of “unfounded rumours” regarding the origins of SARS-CoV-2. She hopes that these same restrictions will not apply to other scientists doing similar work, but is encouraged by the number of research groups that are now studying coronaviruses following the COVID-19 pandemic.
doi: doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-01566-0
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