NIH funds new research to combat emerging viruses

The Albert Einstein College of Medicine has received a five-year, $14 million per year grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to participate in a broad national initiative to develop plug-and-play vaccines and antibody-based therapies against a variety of emerging viruses. The grant is part of NIAID's new Vaccines and Monoclonal Antibodies for Pandemic Preparedness (ReVAMPP) Research and Development Network announced earlier today.

“COVID-19 has taught us a lot about pandemic preparedness, and we want to make sure we build on what has worked well,” said Kartik Chandran, Ph.D., the grant's principal investigator and professor of microbiology and immunology, Gertrude and David Feinson Chair in Medicine, and Harold and Muriel Block Faculty Scholar in Virology at Einstein. “One of the most important lessons from the COVID pandemic is that existing research on a family of viruses allows scientists to develop vaccines and therapeutics for a specific virus much more quickly. In our project, we plan to create a baseline of critical knowledge about groups of similar viruses and then – should a related 'virus X' pose a health threat – develop specific countermeasures as quickly as possible to save as many lives as possible.”

The Einstein-led consortium, called PROVIDENT (Prepositioning Optimized Strategies for Vaccines and Immunotherapeutics Against Diverse Emerging Infectious Threats), will bring together 13 teams from academia, government and industry to conduct four projects with the following goals:

• Discover and analyze virus-host interactions and the molecular mechanisms involved in viral diseases.
• Design proteins to elicit antiviral immune responses and then evaluate and optimize those responses.
• Create roadmaps for the rapid development of RNA vaccines against microbes with pandemic potential; and
• Map the antibody responses observed in virus-infected humans and use this knowledge to develop vaccines and therapeutics.

PROVIDENT builds on NIAID's 2021 Pandemic Preparedness Plan, a comprehensive federal program designed to address the uncertainties of protecting global health from communicable diseases. The two-part plan focuses on “priority pathogens” and “prototype pathogens” – essentially the known and unknown of the viral world. Priority pathogens include viruses known to cause severe illness or death in humans, such as dengue virus and Ebola virus.

Prototype pathogens – the focus of PROVIDENT – are representative viruses from families that have the potential to cause serious disease in humans. “We plan to select and study one or two prototype viruses from each family and then develop countermeasures that work against as many viruses from that family as possible,” said Dr. Chandran.

This strategy of responding quickly to an emerging virus with an approach and tools that have already been developed is what we mean by 'plug and play.'”

Kartik Chandran, Ph.D., Gertrude and David Feinson Chair of Medicine, Albert Einstein College of Medicine

Part of PROVIDENT's strategy is to conduct “sprints” in which countermeasures developed for the prototype pathogens are tested on other viruses of the same family to test their effectiveness and improve them.

PROVIDENT will focus on three families of viruses: nairoviruses transmitted by ticks (e.g. Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever virus), hantaviruses transmitted by rodents and other small mammals (e.g. Sin Nombre virus and other agents causing hantavirus pulmonary syndrome), and paramyxoviruses transmitted by bats and other mammals, including domesticated animals (e.g. Nipah virus).

“This approach enabled researchers to act quickly during the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Dr. Chandran. “What we had learned from previous coronavirus outbreaks, including SARS [severe acute respiratory syndrome] in 2002 and MERS [Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome] a decade later, it has helped us develop diagnostics, vaccines and therapeutics against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.”

“The recent outbreaks of Mpox, Nipah virus and Eastern equine encephalomyelitis, as well as other viral infections, underscore the need for an even more comprehensive preparedness program,” said Dr. Eva Mittler, research assistant professor at Einstein and leader of one of the PROVIDENT components. “We do not know which virus will cause the next pandemic.”

“The overarching goal of PROVIDENT and the other centers in the ReVAMPP network is to coordinate their efforts to increase our chances of a timely and effective response,” added Dr. Chandran.

Projects and cores in PROVIDENT are led by:

• Kartik Chandran, PhD., Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, NY
• Eva Mittler, Ph.D., Einstein
• Jason McLellan, Ph.D., University of Texas, Austin, TX
• Courtney Cohen, Ph.D., U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, Fort Detrick, MD (USAMRIID)
• John Cooke, MD, Ph.D., Houston Methodist Research Institute, Houston, TX (HMRI)
• Eva Harris, Ph.D. University of California-Berkeley, Berkeley, CA
• Stephanie Monticelli, Ph.D., USAMRIID
• Steven Bradfute, Ph.D., University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM
• Andrew Herbert, Ph.D., USAMRIID
• Jesse Erasmus, Ph.D., HDT Bio, Seattle, WA
• Jimmy Gollihar, Ph.D., HMRI

In addition, the following scientists and institutions will play an important role in PROVIDENT:

• Zachary Bornholdt, PhD., Eitr Biologics, Inc., San Diego, CA
• Daniel Boutz, Ph.D., HMRI
• Giorgi Chakhunashvili, Ph.D., National Center for Disease Control and Public Health, Tbilisi, Georgia
• Catalina Florez, Ph.D., USAMRIID
• Bronwyn Gunn, Ph.D., Washington State University, Pullman, WA
• Andrew Horton, Ph.D., HMRI
• Amit Khandhar, Ph.D., HDT Bio
• Taishi Kimura, PhD, HDT Bio
• Jonathan Lai, Ph.D., Einstein
• Jodi McGill, Ph.D., Iowa State University, Ames, IA
• Crystal Moyer, Ph.D., Eitr Biologics
• Thomas Segall-Shapiro, Ph.D., HMRI
• Simone Sidoli, Ph.D., Einstein
• E. Taylor Stone, PhD., HDT Bio
• Francesca Taraballi, Ph.D., HMRI
• Cecilia Vial, Ph.D., Universidad del Desarollo, Santiago, Chile
• Pablo Vial, MD, University of Desarollo
• Zhongde Wang, Ph.D., Utah State University, Logan, UT