(somber humming music)
- [Pardis] That year was a tragedy.
That never, ever should've happened.
We lost a lot of amazing, beloved people.
Those individuals sacrificed their lives helping others.
By the time the world knew what was going on,
it was way too late.
- Sequencing the genome of a virus is very impactful
when you're trying to respond to an outbreak,
because everything about that virus
is sort of based on that sequence.
So we are really invested in getting sequencing
on ground in every country.
The more you empower all the way
to the point of infection, the better.
(hopeful piano music)
- Why are there so many new deadly infectious diseases,
like Ebola, Zika, Chikungunya, and Avian Flu?
- We're here at the Broad Institute
to talk to Pardis Sabeti,
who's using genomic technologies to study viral outbreaks.
(lively percussion music)
Where do these viruses come from?
- We think about these what we call emerging diseases
as these things that are new in the human population
suddenly coming out of nowhere.
And what I started to realize as I studied these viruses
is they're already here.
- The viruses are so small and so difficult to detect.
How do you sequence them?
- That's the amazing thing about
the technological revolution that's happening in genomics,
is it's getting more and more powerful,
more and more sensitive.
We're looking for all the reads,
everything that's in your blood
in another clinical specimen,
and find those reads.
- When a patient comes into the hospital
with a suspected fever of some sort,
their samples are taken and brought to the clinic.
We take that sample and then isolate the RNA that we want.
We then have to make the RNA sample into cDNA,
which is just a complimentary DNA of the RNA,
and that's what's required for sequencing.
After we make cDNA,
we take the sample and we make sequencing libraries,
and those libraries are short fragments
of the genetic material
that will then be put onto the sequencing machine
to get the data and sequencing information.
- We can use that information to help us
develop diagnostics and vaccines and therapies,
'cause fundamentally they're all based
on the genome sequence.
We can take sequences from a number
of different viruses and different patients
and we can create a family tree.
One of the things we found in the Ebola outbreak
was that the virus likely entered the human population once,
and then was from there was transmitting
from human to human.
The likely first case happened in December of 2013
in a village in Guinea.
A small child succumbed to the disease,
but there's no diagnosis in place.
It took all the way until March of 2014
when we first recognized that the virus was in Guinea.
And then it spilled over into Liberia,
and by the time it came into Sierra Leone in May of 2014,
it was like a tidal wave,
and it was way too late.
(melancholy acoustic music)
(horn beeping)
- Our biggest focus was how to get attention
to what we thought was an escalating crisis
that was not really getting attention.
- When you sequenced the Ebola genome,
what was the first thing you did?
- We released it to the web.
We immediately got lots of people reaching out to us
developing diagnostics,
thinking about vaccines,
analyzing the data.
- When I got to West Africa
to bring the sequencing technology
and to train the technicians and staff
on how to use the sequencing technology,
it was a really humbling experience,
the struggles that they go through day to day
in their own labs with power,
with dealing with the heat,
dealing with limited resources.
A lot of the sequencing reagents and enzymes
and things that we use day to day in the lab
are not available.
So if you run out of something,
you can't just call the vendor
and have it delivered the next day.
- [Pardis] We have a program bringing them here to the U.S.,
working with us in our lab.
We're now at 76 individuals
that we've trained in this program
from six different countries.
They're all on the front lines,
and we continue to engage them
so that they can share best practices.
- With all the sacrifices that people have made,
how can we apply those lessons?
- I mean, lessons learned here is that,
I mean, working together as a team
helps us to achieve greater progress.
And for us here having diagnostic capability on site
helps us a lot,
especially having a sequencing machine on the ground.
It helps us to track an outbreak,
and also be in a position to diagnose almost all patients
that will come with unknown causes of illness,
especially those with a fever.
(uplifting acoustic and vocal music)