Revised award to EcoHealth Alliance will no longer involve studies of hybrid coronaviruses.
Three years after then-President Donald Trump pressured the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to suspend a research grant to a U.S. group studying bat coronaviruses with partners in China, the agency has restarted the award.
The new 4-year grant is a stripped-down version of the original grant to the EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit research organization in New York City, providing $576,000 per year. That 2014 award included funding for controversial experiments that mixed parts of different bat viruses related to severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), the coronavirus that sparked a global outbreak in 2002–04, and included a subaward to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). The new award omits those studies, and also imposes extensive new accounting rules on EcoHealth, which drew criticism from government auditors for its bookkeeping practices.
But EcoHealth’s embattled director, Peter Daszak, says his group is pleased: “Now we have the ability to finally get back to work,” he says.
After NIH axed the grant in April 2020, many scientists protested the move as political interference with scientific peer review. Now, they are welcoming the grant’s resumption. “It is long overdue. Unfortunately, the original cancellation reflects the ongoing partisan politics where first Trump and now many Republicans are attacking science unfairly,” says Nobel Prize winner Richard Roberts of New England Biolabs. In May 2020, he helped organize a letter from 77 Nobel laureates protesting the grant’s termination. (In July 2020, NIH changed its status to a suspension with new, unusual conditions.)
Grant number R01AI110964, which NIH renewed in 2019 with a subaward to WIV that totaled nearly $600,000 over 8 years, is probably the most scrutinized grant in the agency’s history. Trump called for its cancellation in April 2020 amid unsupported allegations that a lab leak at WIV started the COVID-19 pandemic. The project later drew concerns for experiments, conducted in virologist Shi Zhengli’s lab at WIV, in which researchers attached the spike protein of various wild bat coronaviruses to a different virus “backbone” in order to gauge the wild pathogens’ potential to infect human airway cells. Such experiments allow scientists to isolate the role of the spike protein and study coronaviruses that they can’t culture easily.
Critics, including several Republicans in Congress, argued this work qualified as risky “gain-of-function” (GOF) research that makes potential pandemic viruses more dangerous and should have undergone a special review. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and its director at the time, Anthony Fauci, responded that the work did not fit NIH’s risky GOF definition; the bat viruses weren’t known to infect people and WIV had no intention of making them more dangerous. NIH also pointed out that the WIV chimeras were only distantly related to SARS-CoV-2.
Concerns escalated when public records requests from the nonprofit news organization the Intercept revealed some of the chimeric viruses showed unexpected growth. NIH and EcoHealth disagreed about whether this result was reported promptly as required by the grant. (Earlier this year, an NIH advisory board recommended expanding the rules for risky GOF experiments.)
NIH told EcoHealth in August 2022 that because WIV had not responded to requests to turn over lab notebooks and electronic records, it had terminated the subaward to WIV. But the agency also said EcoHealth could renegotiate the grant without WIV. As discussions continued, in January a federal audit found that EcoHealth had misreported nearly $90,000 in expenses, and that NIH had also erred by not justifying the grant’s April 2020 termination.
EcoHealth is sharing details of the new grant, which restarted on 26 April, in order to promote transparency, Daszak says. The project no longer involves collecting new bat samples or working with live viruses. WIV has no role beyond contributing more than 300 whole and partial genome sequences of SARS-related bat coronaviruses from its collection, Daszak says.
EcoHealth staff will use computers to analyze the viral genomes for risky features, then partner with a previous collaborator, Linfa Wang’s lab at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore, to test whether the viruses’ spike proteins can bind to the human angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 receptor, which SARS-CoV-2 uses to enter human cells. Wang’s lab will also study “pseudoviruses” that combine a wild coronavirus with a completely different virus that can’t cause human disease. And the project will study archived clinical samples from Southeast Asia to look for signs of “spillovers” where bat viruses infected people.
“We think we can achieve a huge amount of work based on archived samples … that will really answer some fundamental questions about why coronaviruses have such diversity,” Daszak says.
NIH is also imposing new requirements on all of EcoHealth’s NIH grants, including prior approval for spending, submission of invoices and timesheets, and a financial audit that EcoHealth must pay for. The nonprofit has three other NIH grants to collect bat and human samples in South and Southeast Asia, including one that proposes chimera work. But Daszak notes that work would only move forward if it passes the special GOF review.
Other virologists agree the revised grant will still yield valuable insights. “I consider the extra parts [in the original grant] useful, but not essential. So I think the project will still move forward very well,” says Stanley Perlman, a coronavirus expert at the University of Iowa. Virologist Simon Anthony of the University of California, Davis, who has worked with EcoHealth on a virus surveillance project called PREDICT, agrees. “In my view there is nothing wrong with taking the time to pause, reflect, and redirect so that this critical work can be conducted as safely as possible,” Anthony says.
But both he and Perlman say if viruses with the potential to spill over into humans are identified, it will be important to study the live pathogens in high-containment, biosafety level-3 conditions. Although not GOF research, some scientists have argued that even studying natural wild viruses imposes unacceptable risks of a lab escape and should be curtailed. Anthony, however, says “cutting out work with live natural viruses would be tremendously detrimental.”
One vocal EcoHealth critic, microbiologist Richard Ebright of Rutgers University, calls the restarted grant “an outrage” because EcoHealth “flagrantly and repeatedly” violated the terms of the grant.
Another past critic of the group, molecular biologist Alina Chan of the Broad Institute, is mostly satisfied with the revised grant. The project “has been sufficiently derisked” and “is worth doing,” she says. “They might as well continue to analyze” the samples from WIV, but she would have liked to see a new partner to lend “objectivity.”
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