Scientists Target Next Pandemic With Powerful New “Map” to Victory Over Viruses

An international team of scientists has created a powerful new resource to accelerate the development of vaccines and treatments to fight the next pandemic.

Researcher Wladek Minor, PhD, of the University of Virginia School of Medicine and collaborators in China and Poland have developed an Internet information system called virusMED, which describes everything we know about the atomic structure and potential vulnerabilities of more than 800 virus strains from 75 different virus families. , including SARS-CoV-2, influenza, Ebola, and HIV-1. Several of the collaborators, including the lead researcher, Heping Zheng, are former students and members of the Minor lab at UVA.

This new panorama of the proteins of potential threats will help scientists respond quickly and effectively against the next pathogen poised to wreak havoc on humanity. Minor and his collaborators compare the resource to Google Maps in that it organizes and annotates key points of interest about a virus that scientists can use as a roadmap in drug and vaccine development.

An image produced by virusMED, a tool scientists can use to develop new treatments and vaccines for the next pandemic. Credit: Courtesy of Wladek Minor

“The battle with COVID-19 is not over yet, but we can’t wait to prepare for the next pandemic. VirusMED is a step towards an advanced information system that brings together researchers with diverse expertise to address complex biomedical challenges,” said Minor, the Harrison Distinguished Professor of Molecular Physiology and Biological Physics at UVA. “The information in virusMED will help viral researchers from many disciplines, especially those working to design drugs or antiviral therapies. We provide novel structural analyzes and integrate relevant information from different sources to get a comprehensive picture of the proteins’ most important and vulnerable regions.”

Virus hotspots

Rapidly unlocking the mechanism of action of the SARS-CoV-2 virus has allowed scientists to develop safe and effective vaccines for COVID-19. Minor’s new database aims to put that kind of critical information at the fingertips of scientists in one convenient location.

VirusMED contains comprehensive information on virus types and strains, hosts, viral proteins and antibodies, as well as drugs already approved by the US Food and Drug Administration, among other important scientific data. The researchers call the points of interest on a virus are ‘hotspots’, and these hotspots are strong starting points for the development of medicines and vaccines.

Researcher Wladek Minor, PhD, of the University of Virginia School of Medicine and collaborators in China and Poland have developed an Internet information system called virusMED, which describes everything we know about the atomic structure and potential vulnerabilities of more than 800 virus strains from 75 different virus families. , including SARS-CoV-2, influenza, Ebola and HIV 1. Credit: Dan Addison | UVA communication

“One of the most promising strain-indifferent antibody therapies developed to treat COVID-19 used this kind of information to improve a unique antibody isolated from a survivor infected with the SARS virus in 2003,” said David. Cooper, PhD, research faculty in the Minor’s lab. “People who are surprised by the rapid design of drugs and vaccines fail to realize that researchers today are building on decades of previous research.”

One of the great benefits of virusMED is that it brings together existing knowledge about viruses in one location, Minor said. Previously, that data was scattered across multiple sources and often “silosed” so that it was not easily accessible. With virusMED, researchers can browse the information by virus or at their hotspot.

The free and publicly accessible database can be found at https://virusmed.biocloud.top.

“One of the goals of my lab is to create tools that other scientists can use. We look at the forest and find ways to help others focus on the trees,” Minor said. “Resource generation is not glamorous, but the ultimate goal of science is to make life better. One of the newspaper’s anonymous peer reviewers claimed that they had become an avid user of the system right away. We expect virusMED to make a real difference.”

Reference: “virusMED: an atlas of viral protein hotspots” by HuiHui Zhang, Pei Chen, Haojie Ma, Magdalena Woinska, Dejian Liu, David R. Cooper, Guo Peng, Yousong Peng, Lei Deng, Wladek Minorc, and Heping Zheng, 28 September 2021, IUCr Diary.
DOI: 10.1107/S2052252521009076

The researchers have published their findings in the scientific journal IUCr Journal. The work will be featured on the cover of the magazine. The research team consisted of HuiHui Zhang, Pei Chen, Haojie Ma, Magdalena Woinska, Dejian Liu, Cooper, Guo Peng, Yousong Peng, Lei Deng, Minor and Zheng.

The work was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Hunan Province and the National Natural Science Foundation of China. Minor and Cooper were supported by the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences, Grant R01-GM132595.