Creating A COMPASS To Navigate Future Pandemics
Viruses like SARS-CoV-2 do not respect boundaries, spreading between species and continents and wreaking havoc as they go. Beating the next infection with pandemic potential requires us to improve our ability to cross borders—across fields of study, between research universities, and between scientists and the general public.
The US National Science Foundation (NSF) has announced a $18 million award to help achieve that goal. The funding brings together five universities and over 20 researchers, academics, and public health specialists to form the Virginia Tech-led Center for Community Empowering Pandemic Prediction and Prevention from Atoms to Societies (COMPASS).
Collaborators will have access to high-tech labs, data centers, and other resources at the center, which is located in the university’s interdisciplinary Data and Decision Sciences Building. However, the work will not be limited to the buildings or even the borders of Virginia Tech.
Cornell University, the University of Michigan, Meharry Medical College, and Wake Forest University will also work together to address the vital challenge of preventing infectious illnesses that endanger global society. T.M. Murali, assistant department head for research in the Department of Computer Science, will lead the new center.
The COMPASS Center is part of the $72 million NSF Predictive Intelligence for Pandemic Prevention program, which was designed to better understand how infections and diseases emerge and spread, as well as to teach the next generation of scientists to continue the work of stopping them. The initiative received two rounds of financing from the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost, which established a Virginia Tech research priority on pandemic prediction and prevention.
“This NSF award exemplifies what can be achieved by convening an interdisciplinary team of faculty committed to advancing an area of particular strength at Virginia Tech: the development of predictive models and approaches necessary for management of infectious diseases that so often arise from the inextricable linkages between humans, animals, and the environment,” stated Executive Vice President and Provost Cyril Clarke. “Pandemic prediction and prevention is an area of scholarly emphasis selected for prioritized investment through our transdisciplinary Destination Area program.”
At a Glance
The $18 million, Virginia Tech-led COMPASS Center will
Bring together researchers and academics from all fields and organize them around one goal: knowing how a virus infects its host and what it does in the body.
include scholars from Cornell University, the University of Michigan, Meharry Medical College, and
Wake Forest University.
Focus on talking with and, most importantly, listening to the public’s needs and concerns.
Inspire and teach the next generation of scientists to advance pandemic science and improve communication with non-scientists about it.
The bulk of new human viruses come from wild and domestic animal species. “There are many challenges in trying to determine if a virus that currently infects one or more animals can jump to humans and when that leap can lead to a pandemic,” Murali informed the audience.
The center will focus on answering four major questions:
How do pathogens, such as viruses, spread from one species to another? Researchers will utilize machine learning-based predictive models to determine how changes in a pathogen may allow it to infect new species.
How does a pathogen multiply within its host? The research team will devise novel methods for creating organoids, which are miniaturized versions of organs that imitate their key activities, in order to cultivate a new virus, analyze its life cycle, and test new and existing medications and therapies on it.
What variables allow a pathogen to remain in the environment? The researchers’ goal is to develop methods for identifying the characteristics of a disease or its environment that can lead to inactivation.
How will we use the scientific information gained from this endeavor to empower the general public? Faculty and students working in COMPASS will be trained to better communicate with the public about pandemic science, and researchers will meet with the public in their community dialogues.
“What we are focusing on is really trying to understand how a pathogen or a virus can shift to a new host and how it interacts with a host at a cellular, organ, or whole body level,”
Murali told me. “Essentially, we want to discover the rules of life that govern these interactions and use that information to make the world safer.”
In the collaborators’ words
To attain the ambitious goal of understanding and predicting how viruses interact with hosts, collaborators will focus on four critical areas.
Crossing the species barrier
X.J. Meng, University Distinguished Professor of Molecular Virology at the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine, researches emerging and zoonotic viruses with veterinary and human public health implications and develops life-saving vaccinations.
“With collaborators at Cornell University and the University of Michigan, we will seek to forecast, using novel machine learning methods, which viruses may jump from animals to humans and which precise alterations within the viral genome may permit these transitions. We will also confirm the computational predictions experimentally using human organoid cells,” Meng explained. “Successful identification of genetic elements responsible for virus species jumping and adaptation will help design better prevention and control strategies against emerging viruses.”
Replicating within a host
Padma Rajagopalan, Robert E. Hord Jr Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering, and partners from Wake Forest Medical School will contribute their knowledge of the liver and other tissues and organs to the collaboration. While viruses and other diseases are extensively studied, they can be challenging to cultivate in the lab. Organoids could hold the key to gaining a better knowledge of a developing virus’s life cycle and potential countermeasures.
“We believe that 3D multicellular tissue organoids — miniature tissue models that mimic key functions of an organ—can be used to understand how viruses enter, propagate, and potentially cause damage to different organs either individually or when integrated together,” Rajagopalan told CNN. “On the other side of the equation, engineers, biologists and virologists can work together to test drugs that could be used against the virus and any complications it causes.”
Persisting in the environment and achieving university distinction. Professor Linsey Marr of the Charles Edward Via, Jr. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, along with collaborators from the University of Michigan, will investigate what allows emerging infections to thrive and survive, as well as what factors can prevent their spread.
“How long a virus survives, or persists, in the environment is an important component in its potential to propagate quickly. “If SARS-CoV-2 had not survived long in respiratory droplets, we would not have had a pandemic,” Marr added. “COMPASS will help us be able to predict whether new threats, such as the H5N1 flu virus in cows, can survive for a long time in milk or whether it would quickly die off under certain conditions.”
Empowering Scientists and the Public
Patricia Raun, an Alumni Distinguished Professor of Theatre Arts, helped establish the university’s Center for Communicating Science in 2016, which she now leads. Based on a concept devised by actor and scientific lover Alan Alda, the institute trains and educates everyone about science using artistic skills such as embodied learning, deep listening, improvisation, role play, and storytelling.
Raun and her crew will train COMPASS instructors and students in new methods to communicate with and listen to the public. This training will be provided to summer interns chosen by collaborators at Meharry Medical College.
“I believe it’s going to take all of us to solve the world’s challenging problems,” Raun told the crowd. “My part of that is around helping scientists and people in highly technical fields connect with the public and communicate with us in ways we can understand.”
The Virginia Tech faculty working with the COMPASS Center include
- M. Murali, Principal Investigator and Center Director
Julie Gerdes is an assistant professor of technical and professional writing and rhetoric at the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences.
Anuj Karpatne, associate professor of computer science at the College of Engineering, and key faculty at the Sanghani Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics
Kylene Kehn-Hall is professor of virology at the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine and director of the Center for Emerging, Zoonotic, and Arthropod-borne Pathogens.
Lisa M. Lee is the temporary senior associate vice president for research and innovation and director of the Division of Scholarly Integrity and Research Compliance.
Linsey Marr is a University Distinguished Professor and Charles P. Lunsford Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, while X.J. Meng is a University Distinguished Professor of
Molecular Virology at Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine and an internal medicine professor at Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine.
Padma Rajagopalan is the director of the Computational Tissue Engineering Interdisciplinary Graduate Education Program and the Robert E. Hord Jr. Professor of Chemical Engineering.
Naren Ramakrishnan is a Thomas L. Phillips Professor of Engineering and director of the Sanghani Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics.
atricia Raun, an alumni Distinguished Professor of Theatre Arts and Director of the Virginia Tech Center for Communicating Science,.
Next steps:
One of the first events organized by the COMPASS Center will be a National Dialogue on the Ethics of Pandemic Research in Washington, DC, in November. The event’s purpose is to incorporate community voices and comments into pandemic-related research. Researchers and community-based partners will work together to identify critical ethical problems in pandemic science.
The center will collaborate on a variety of research projects with industry, federal agencies, and international organizations. Murali anticipates that these initiatives will result in a robust public-private ecosystem capable of addressing a wide range of pandemic scientific issues.