Genetically Modifying Bats Could Prevent the Next Pandemic, Scientists Say
Genetically Modifying Bats Could Prevent the Next Pandemic, Scientists Say
Tags: Arbovirus, Biodiversity/Conservation, Ecology, Gene drive synthetic, Other mammalsG. Dutton, BioSpace, 2021.
The next COVID pandemic could be prevented by using a gene drive to preemptively edit the genome of bats to prevent them from becoming hosts for coronaviruses, according to a proposal by scientists from Israel’s Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzelia and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Meanwhile, a team of researchers from Imperial College London is devising a way to prevent gene drives from spreading and conferring heritable, anti-competitive traits to entire populations. The two projects may be in conflict with one another, or the London project may provide a degree of safety that could manage unintended consequences. The IDC/NIH plan, Preventing COVID-59, was published recently on GitHub by Uaniv Erlich of the (IDC) and Daniel Douek of the Vaccine Research Center, National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases at the NIH in the U.S. Its premise is that the SARS-CoV-2 virus – the third such virus to infect humans in the past 20 years – is part of a growing pattern of betacoronaviruses infecting human populations.
