My name is Tracey Goldstein,
and I work at UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine.
I'm a Professor in the Department of Pathology,
Microbiology, and Immunology,
and Associate Director of the One Health Institute.
And what I do is really studying diseases in animals
and trying to understand how they may spill over from animals into people.
A good example is this coronavirus outbreak right now,
where it's affecting people,
but we understand that the virus likely came from animals.
My name is Koen Van Rompay.
I work at the California National Primate Research Center
at UC Davis.
What we're trying to do is create
the most effective vaccines.
We are also trying to develop antiviral drugs
to treat people who are already infected.
When there is a new viral disease,
the first thing is you have to know
what virus it is.
You want to know who your real enemy is.
In the old days, the methods were very slow --
techniques like electron microscopy.
These days, with sequencing the viral genome,
within a few days you can usually find out
what kind of virus is causing a new epidemic.
So, when you sequence the genome,
you can start to look at
where there might have been a mutation,
and that will tell you what parts of the viral genome
are important, for example,
to enter human cells.
In many of these animal viruses,
they're able to infect animal cells,
but they don't have the same machinery
to infect a human cell.
But RNA viruses, like ebolaviruses or coronaviruses,
they... you know, their genomes
are a little bit more unstable.
They're sort of always changing.
These big changes in the genome,
you know, they probably are happening all the time,
and sometimes they're random,
but every once in a while,
a change might occur in a part of that genome
that allows it to suddenly become,
you know, infectious in a human.
To develop a vaccine against some new infectious agent,
we can really learn a lot from the natural biology
of the virus.
In order for a virus to infect a human cell,
it needs to be able to bind to what we call
the receptor.
So, it's sort of like a lock and key.
When you think about coronaviruses,
you know, the spike protein,
which is the proteins on the outside of the virus...
we know that that's important for the virus
to be able to enter the human cell.
Once you know that,
you want to see,
which part of the virus should I use
in the vaccine construct?
What we try to do with the vaccine
is to come up with a strategy
that mimics a natural immune response
to infection.
It can either be by using
a live attenuated version of the virus
or taking some part of one of the proteins.
We really want to have something
that's specific against the virus,
but then has minimal cross-reactivity
to normal host proteins,
to minimize the chance for any side effects.
In 2016, when Zika virus broke out,
different primate centers...
we started working groups.
Something similar is now also starting
for the new coronavirus.
People have been really, really forthcoming
with new information
as it's becoming available,
sharing it even before it's been published.
We are going to have meetings
to really share our progress
and brainstorm experimental designs.
Soon, one of the first centers is actually going
to infect some monkeys with coronavirus.
We want to study diseases in animal models
that mimic the human disease.
We move this up from mice and rats
to higher species.
The species that's most...
closest to humans are actually non-human primates
such as rhesus macaques.
And they are usually the final step
for moving something into human clinical trials.
Human trials are done in different stages.
Phase 1 trial is to see, is it safe?
If that looks promising, then you go to a Phase 2,
where you test it in more people.
And the Phase 3 trial is kind of the first one
where you really want to look at,
does the vaccine work?
Does it protect against infection?
If we can all communicate
and we can collaborate very rapidly
-- we can share protocols --
that's kind of how we can make progress a lot faster.
I think during an outbreak,
it's very much a day-to-day response,
trying to understand how to get ahead of the curve
and control the problem.
But after that is when, really,
the big work begins.
Many of these diseases that cause pandemics
come from wildlife.
And our world is changing
really, really quickly.
We're moving into places where we didn't used to go
with our animals:
cutting down forests to make space for farms
or going into caves for mining.
Our behavior is what's facilitating, likely,
the spillover.
What we've been doing is sampling in all these places
around the world.
We focus on bats, rodents, and primates.
So, what we wanted to do was
specifically look and see
how many different coronaviruses
we could find in the different species.
And what was really interesting is,
despite us sampling all of these different taxa,
about 98% of the coronaviruses that we found
were in bats.
And then we mapped the diversity of the bat species
that we found those coronaviruses in.
So, sort of a hotspot map.
It's got the dots of where the viruses are,
and then colors of where we found
high diversity of the different bat species.
And that is useful because it can help us to
project where we might find other coronaviruses,
if we know where those bat species are.
The investment that we put in infectious disease research
pays off --
more than just that one particular disease
that you study,
but really by improving the overall knowledge
of infectious diseases of the immune system.
What there needs to be is
sustained research support
for these things before, during,
and after outbreaks.
The outbreak's over, and then,
you know, that funding goes away,
and then vaccines sit in labs
not being completed and not being trialed.
I think we need to figure out a way to not do that,
not have this boom and bust,
but be always supporting that type of work.
If you could sequence the genomes
of, say, a bunch of different coronaviruses,
how many different cell types can they infect?
And then, you know,
what would you have to do to change them?
You could potentially, over time,
generate data that would start
to maybe show you some things
that you could predict.
We can use that existing knowledge, that database,
to really come up with interventions
a lot faster to attack that new disease.
If we can understand more about the viruses
that are out there,
and have therapeutics and vaccines
and other things in place,
we can be better prepared to respond
to the next thing
versus scrambling every time
that something new pops up.