High egg prices connected to shortages are in the headlines, the result of tens of millions of domestic chickens that have died or been culled due to avian flu, but the H5N1 virus isn’t just a problem for the poultry industry. The virus continues to adapt and mutate, moving closer to becoming a human pathogen and setting up the possibility of a pandemic.
“If we think about a scale where one is a virus that has no concern to humans and 10 is a full-fledged pandemic, right now we’re sitting somewhere at four or five,” according to Andy Pekosz, PhD, a professor in the W. Harry Feinstone Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Pekosz notes that in addition to rising avian flu cases in domestic poultry, there are more than 300 herds of dairy cows now affected and increased incidence of the disease in the human population in the United States. These infections have come from people exposed to sick animals.
“We’ve had over 80 infections of humans with H5N1 just in the last 12 months, and prior to that, we only had one infection in the last 25 years in the U.S. The more human infections we see, the more chances we give the virus to adapt and become a new pandemic that’s targeting the human population,” he says.
Through a collaboration with clinicians, Pekosz’s lab acquires specimens from people who are infected. Using primary respiratory epithelial cell cultures – those that mimic the cells which line human respiratory tracts – the team then grows the most recent variants of the virus to characterize them in terms of how they’re infecting healthy cells, how many new virus particles are made, and how they express proteins.
“What we haven’t seen yet is spread of the avian flu from person to person, but we’re seeing mutations that we think will cause those viruses to replicate better in humans, and that’s really putting us on our top guard,” Pekosz says. “Once we see that transmission from person to person, that’s when the likelihood of a pandemic really increases.”
Pekosz’s team studies seasonal influenza A and B, SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19, and enterovirus-D68, along with emerging respiratory viruses like the avian flu, which originated in wild birds. During the COVID-19 pandemic, his team worked to isolate, grow, and characterize that virus and its mutations and provided data and samples to groups developing the vaccines.
“It’s this basic research that really drives all of those observations that eventually lead to a new vaccine, a new antiviral,” Pekosz says. “We are a bit more prepared for an H5N1 pandemic than we were for COVID-19 because basic research efforts have provided us the blueprint for how to make a good avian flu vaccine.”
Pekosz credits the critical role of private philanthropy for these advances. Support from funders like the Eliasberg Family Foundation helps his team tackle emergent issues at a faster pace and fuels the evidenced-based research needed to compete for federal grants.
“Private philanthropy really forms some of the seed funding to do those first few experimental systems, to really solidify an idea, and then go to the federal funding agencies with a much stronger and more complete case for why this research needs to continue to be funded,” he says. Pekosz notes that his team provides their findings to the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention which are tracking these viruses on national and international levels to enact proper guidelines to protect public health.
For Pekosz specifically, the latest gift from the Eliasberg Family Foundation is a full-circle moment, as it was a gift from them that enabled Dean Emeritus Mike Klag to recruit Pekosz to the Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2007. Their continued support also helped create the Johns Hopkins Center of Excellence in Influenza Research and Response.
“And the most recent gift from the Eliasberg Family Foundation is really allowing us to continue to respond to emerging virus infections without delay,” explains Pekosz, adding this support is used to hire and train doctoral and post-doc researchers, “to train that next generation of research scientists on real-world, important problems.”
One recent finding of Pekosz’s research team shows the H5N1 avian virus doesn’t currently replicate well at the human body temperature.
“Understanding what it would take to become better at replicating at our body temperatures will give really important insight on how close it is to becoming a real human pathogen, but now is the time to act before it gets any more of a concern,” Pekosz says.
Topics: Faculty and Staff, Bloomberg School of Public Health, Fuel Discovery, Promote and Protect Health