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Wuhan Institute of Virology

Coordinates: 30°22′35″N 114°15′45″E / 30.37639°N 114.26250°E / 30.37639; 114.26250
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Not to be confused with Wuhan Centre for Disease Control.

Wuhan Institute of Virology
中国科学院武汉病毒研究所
AbbreviationWIV
Predecessor
  • Wuhan Microbiology Laboratory
  • South China Institute of Microbiology
  • Wuhan Microbiology Institute
  • Microbiology Institute of Hubei Province
Formation1956
FounderChen Huagui, Gao Shangyin
HeadquartersXiaohongshan, Wuchang District, Wuhan, Hubei, China
Coordinates30°22′35″N 114°15′45″E / 30.37639°N 114.26250°E / 30.37639; 114.26250
Director-General
Wang Yanyi
Secretary of Party Committee
Xiao Gengfu[1]
Deputy Director-General
Gong Peng, Guan Wuxiang, Xiao Gengfu
Parent organization
Chinese Academy of Sciences
Websitewhiov.cas.cn
Wuhan Institute of Virology
Simplified Chinese中国科学院武汉病毒研究所
Traditional Chinese中國科學院武漢病毒研究所
Transcriptions
Standard Mandarin
Hanyu PinyinZhōngguó Kēxuéyuàn Wǔhàn Bìngdú Yánjiūsuǒ

The Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (WIV; Chinese: 中国科学院武汉病毒研究所) is a research institute on virology administered by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), which reports to the State Council of the People’s Republic of China.[2] Located in Jiangxia District, Wuhan, Hubei, it opened mainland China's first biosafety level 4 (BSL–4) laboratory.[3] The institute has strong ties to the Galveston National Laboratory in the United States, the Centre International de Recherche en Infectiologie in France and the National Microbiology Laboratory in Canada. The institute has been an active research center for the study of coronaviruses.

History

The WIV was founded in 1956 as the Wuhan Microbiology Laboratory under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). In 1961, it became the South China Institute of Microbiology, and in 1962 was renamed Wuhan Microbiology Institute. In 1970, it became the Microbiology Institute of Hubei Province when the Hubei Commission of Science and Technology took over the administration. In June 1978, it was returned to the CAS and renamed Wuhan Institute of Virology.[4]

In 2003, the Chinese academy of Sciences approved the construction of China's first biosafety level 4 (BSL–4) laboratory at the WIV. The construction of the WIV's National Bio-safety Laboratory was completed at a cost of 300 million yuan ($44 million) in collaboration with the French government's CIRI lab at the end of 2014.[3][5] The new laboratory building has 3000 m2 of BSL-4 space, and also 20 BSL-2 and two BSL-3 laboratories.[6] The BSL-4 facilities were accredited by the China National Accreditation Service for Conformity Assessment (CNAS) in January 2017,[3] with the BSL-4 level lab put into operation in January 2018.[7]

The National Bio-safety Laboratory has strong ties to the Galveston National Laboratory in the University of Texas.[8] It also had strong ties with Canada's National Microbiology Laboratory until WIV staff scientists Xiangguo Qiu and her husband Keding Cheng, who were also remunerated by the Canadian government, were escorted from the Canadian lab for undisclosed reasons in July 2019.[9] The WIV has participated in gain of function research in partnership with US universities and institutions.[10]

A number of safety precautions were taken into consideration when building the Wuhan lab. The lab was built far away from any flood plain. It was also built to withstand a magnitude-7 earthquake, even though the region has no history of earthquakes. The scientific community was also reassured that many Wuhan lab scientists were trained in safety procedures at a BSL-4 lab in Lyon, France.[3] Scientists such as U.S. molecular biologist Richard H. Ebright, who had expressed concern of previous escapes of the SARS virus at Chinese laboratories in Beijing and had been troubled by the pace and scale of China's plans for expansion into BSL–4 laboratories,[3] called the institute a "world-class research institution that does world-class research in virology and immunology" while he noted that the WIV is a world leader in the study of bat coronaviruses.[8]

Coronavirus research

In 2005, a group including researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology published research into the origin of the SARS coronavirus, finding that China's horseshoe bats are natural reservoirs of SARS-like coronaviruses.[11] Continuing this work over a period of years, researchers from the institute sampled thousands of horseshoe bats in locations across China, isolating over 300 bat coronavirus sequences.[12]

In 2015, an international team including two scientists from the institute published successful research on whether a bat coronavirus could be made to infect HeLa. The team engineered a hybrid virus, combining a bat coronavirus with a SARS virus that had been adapted to grow in mice and mimic human disease. The hybrid virus was able to infect human cells.[13][14]

In 2017, a team from the institute announced that coronaviruses found in horseshoe bats at a cave in Yunnan contain all the genetic pieces of the SARS virus, and hypothesized that the direct progenitor of the human virus originated in this cave. The team, who spent five years sampling the bats in the cave, noted the presence of a village only a kilometer away, and warned of "the risk of spillover into people and emergence of a disease similar to SARS".[12][15]

In 2018, another paper by a team from the institute reported the results of a serological study of a sample of villagers residing near these bat caves (near Xiyang Township 夕阳乡 in Jinning District of Yunnan). According to this report, 6 out of the 218 local residents in the sample carried antibodies to the bat coronaviruses in their blood, indicating the possibility of transmission of the infections from bats to people.[16]

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, coronavirus research at the WIV was conducted in BSL-2 and BSL-3 laboratories.[17]

COVID-19 pandemic

See also: COVID-19 misinformation and Investigations into the origin of COVID-19

In December 2019, cases of pneumonia associated with an unknown coronavirus were reported to health authorities in Wuhan. The institute checked its coronavirus collection and found the new virus had 96% genetic similarity to RaTG13, a virus its researchers had discovered in horseshoe bats in southwest China.[18][19]

As the virus spread worldwide, the institute continued its investigation. In February 2020, the New York Times reported that a team led by Shi Zhengli at the institute were the first to identify, analyze and name the genetic sequence of the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV), upload it to public databases for scientists around the world to understand,[20][21] and publish papers in Nature.[22] On 19 February 2020, the lab released a letter on its website describing how they successfully obtained the whole virus genome.[23] In February 2020, in a move that raised concerns regarding intellectual property rights,[24] the institute applied for a patent in China for the use of remdesivir, an experimental drug owned by Gilead Sciences, which the institute found inhibited the virus in vitro.[25] The WIV said it would not exercise its new Chinese patent rights "if relevant foreign companies intend to contribute to the prevention and control of China’s epidemic".[26]

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the laboratory has been the focus of conspiracy theories and unfounded speculation about the origin of the virus.[27][28] Shi Zheng-Li commented on this controversy by saying: "Sadly, WIV was at the center of the misleading speculations regarding the origin of the virus, which were not fully clarified until a recent joint study was performed by an international expert team led by the World Health Organization (WHO) and Chinese experts."[29] In April 2020, the Trump administration terminated a NIH grant to research how coronaviruses spread from bats to humans.[30][31] On February 9, 2021, after investigations in Wuhan, the WHO said a laboratory "leak" origin for COVID-19 was "extremely unlikely",[32][33] confirming what experts already expected about the likely origins and early transmission.[34]

In May, 2021, it was learned that three researchers from the lab became sick enough with COVID-19 like symptoms in November, 2019 to require hospitalization[35]. This new information raised suspicions among many, like Dr. Anthony Fauci[36], that the laboratory could potentially be the source of the virus that has killed at least 3,000,000 people worldwide so far.

Research centers

The Institute contains the following research centers:[37]

  • Center for Emerging Infectious Disease
  • Chinese Virus Resources and Bioinformatics Center
  • Center of Applied and Environmental Microbiology
  • Department of Analytical Biochemistry and Biotechnology
  • Department of Molecular Virology

See also

References

  1. ^ "Current leader" 现任领导. Wuhan Institute of Virology, www.whiov.ac.cn. Archived from the original on 24 February 2020. Retrieved 24 February 2020. Wang Yanyi, born in 1981, Ph.D., researcher. She is currently the director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the leader of the molecular immunology discipline group... Xiao Gengfu, born in 1966, Ph.D., researcher. Current Secretary of the Party Committee and Deputy Director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology...
  2. ^ "Fact check: The Wuhan Institute of Virology is not owned by GlaxoSmithKline". Reuters. 17 December 2020. Retrieved 7 April 2021.
  3. ^ a b c d e Cyranoski, David (23 February 2017). "Inside the Chinese lab poised to study world's most dangerous pathogens". Nature. 542 (7642): 399–400. Bibcode:2017Natur.542..399C. doi:10.1038/nature.2017.21487. PMID 28230144.
  4. ^ "History". Wuhan Institute of Virology, CAS. Archived from the original on 29 July 2019. Retrieved 26 January 2020.
  5. ^ "China Inaugurates the First Biocontainment Level 4 Laboratory in Wuhan". Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. 3 February 2015. Archived from the original on 3 March 2016. Retrieved 9 April 2016.
  6. ^ Report of the WHO Consultative Meeting on High/Maximum Containment (Biosafety Level 4) Laboratories Networking, Lyon, France, 13–15 December 2017. Geneva: World Health Organization; 2018 (WHO/WHE/CPI/2018.40).
  7. ^ "China's first bio-safety level 4 lab put into operation". xinhuanet. 4 January 2018.
  8. ^ a b Taylor, Adam (29 January 2020). "Experts debunk fringe theory linking China's coronavirus to weapons research". Washington Post. Archived from the original on 31 January 2020. Retrieved 3 February 2020.
  9. ^ Pauls, Karen (15 July 2019). "University severs ties with two researchers who were escorted out of National Microbiology Lab". CBC News. Archived from the original on 15 April 2020. Retrieved 19 April 2020.
  10. ^ Josh Rogin (8 March 2021). "Chaos under heaven: Wuhan lab book excerpt". Politico.
  11. ^ Li, Wendong; Shi, Zhengli; Yu, Meng; Ren, Wuze; Smith, Craig; Epstein, Jonathan H; Wang, Hanzhong; Crameri, Gary; Hu, Zhihong; Zhang, Huajun; Zhang, Jianhong; McEachern, Jennifer; Field, Hume; Daszak, Peter; Eaton, Bryan T; Zhang, Shuyi; Wang, Lin-Fa (28 October 2005). "Bats Are Natural Reservoirs of SARS-Like Coronaviruses". Science. 310 (5748): 676–679. Bibcode:2005Sci...310..676L. doi:10.1126/science.1118391. PMID 16195424. S2CID 2971923.
  12. ^ a b Cyranoski, David (1 December 2017). "Bat cave solves mystery of deadly SARS virus – and suggests new outbreak could occur". Nature. 552 (7683): 15–16. Bibcode:2017Natur.552...15C. doi:10.1038/d41586-017-07766-9.
  13. ^ Vineet D Menachery; Boyd L Yount; Kari Debbink; et al. (9 November 2015). "A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence". Nature Medicine. 21 (12): 1508–1513. doi:10.1038/NM.3985. ISSN 1078-8956. PMC 4797993. PMID 26552008. S2CID 5953778. Wikidata Q36702376. (erratum)
  14. ^ Butler, Declan (12 November 2015). "Engineered bat virus stirs debate over risky research". Nature. doi:10.1038/nature.2015.18787.
  15. ^ Drosten, C.; Hu, B.; Zeng, L.-P.; Yang, X.-L.; Ge, Xing-Yi; Zhang, Wei; Li, Bei; Xie, J.-Z.; Shen, X.-R.; Zhang, Yun-Zhi; Wang, N.; Luo, D.-S.; Zheng, X.-S.; Wang, M.-N.; Daszak, P.; Wang, L.-F.; Cui, J.; Shi, Z.-L. (2017). "Discovery of a rich gene pool of bat SARS-related coronaviruses provides new insights into the origin of SARS coronavirus". PLOS Pathogens. 13 (11): e1006698. doi:10.1371/journal.ppat.1006698. PMC 5708621. PMID 29190287.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: unflagged free DOI (link)
  16. ^ Wang, N.; Li, S. Y.; Yang, X. L.; Huang, H. M.; Zhang, Y. J.; Guo, H.; Luo, C. M.; Miller, M.; Zhu, G.; Chmura, A. A.; Hagan, E.; Zhou, J. H.; Zhang, Y. Z.; Wang, L. F.; Daszak, P.; Shi, Z. L. (2018). "Serological Evidence of Bat SARS-Related Coronavirus Infection in Humans". China Virologica Sinica. 33 (1): 104–107. doi:10.1007/s12250-018-0012-7. PMC 6178078. PMID 29500691.
  17. ^ "Reply to Science Magazine" (PDF). sciencemag.org: 9.
  18. ^ Qiu, Jane (11 March 2020). "How China's "Bat Woman" Hunted Down Viruses from SARS to the New Coronavirus". Scientific American. Archived from the original on 18 March 2020. Retrieved 18 March 2020.
  19. ^ Rathore, Jitendra Singh; Ghosh, Chaitali (August 25, 2020). "Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), a newly emerged pathogen: an overview". Pathogens and Disease. 78 (6). doi:10.1093/femspd/ftaa042. ISSN 2049-632X. OCLC 823140442. PMC 7499575. PMID 32840560.
  20. ^ Buckley, Chris; Steven Lee Myers (1 February 2020). "As New Coronavirus Spread, China's Old Habits Delayed Fight". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 19 March 2020. Retrieved 3 February 2020.
  21. ^ Cohen, Jon (1 February 2020). "Mining coronavirus genomes for clues to the outbreak's origins". Science. Archived from the original on 3 February 2020. Retrieved 4 February 2020. The viral sequences, most researchers say, also knock down the idea the pathogen came from a virology institute in Wuhan.
  22. ^ Zhengli, Shi; Team of 29 researchers at the WIV (3 February 2020). "A pneumonia outbreak associated with a new coronavirus of probable bat origin". Nature. 579 (7798): 270–273. Bibcode:2020Natur.579..270Z. doi:10.1038/s41586-020-2012-7. PMC 7095418. PMID 32015507.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  23. ^ "A letter to all staff and graduate students". WIV Official Website (in Chinese). 19 February 2020. Archived from the original on 26 April 2020. Retrieved 24 May 2020.
  24. ^ "China Wants to Patent Gilead's Experimental Coronavirus Drug". Bloomberg News. Archived from the original on 6 February 2020. Retrieved 5 February 2020.
  25. ^ Zhengli, Shi; Team of 10 researchers at the WIV (4 February 2020). "Remdesivir and chloroquine effectively inhibit the recently emerged novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) in vitro". Nature. 30 (3): 269–271. doi:10.1038/s41422-020-0282-0. PMC 7054408. PMID 32020029.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  26. ^ Grady, Denise (6 February 2020). "China Begins Testing an Antiviral Drug in Coronavirus Patients". New York Times. Archived from the original on 8 February 2020. Retrieved 8 February 2020.
  27. ^ Hakim MS (February 2021). "SARS‐CoV‐2, Covid‐19, and the debunking of conspiracy theories". Rev Med Virol (Review): e2222. doi:10.1002/rmv.2222. PMC 7995093. PMID 33586302.
  28. ^ Graham, Rachel L.; Baric, Ralph S. (May 2020). "SARS-CoV-2: Combating Coronavirus Emergence". Immunity. 52 (5): 734–736. doi:10.1016/j.immuni.2020.04.016. PMC 7207110. PMID 32392464.
  29. ^ Zheng-Li, Shi (2021). "Origins of SARS-CoV-2: Focusing on Science". Infectious Diseases & Immunity. 1 (1): 3–4. PMC 8057312.
  30. ^ Subbaraman, Nidhi (21 August 2020). "'Heinous!': Coronavirus researcher shut down for Wuhan-lab link slams new funding restrictions". Nature. doi:10.1038/d41586-020-02473-4. PMID 32826989.
  31. ^ "Under Political Pressure, NIH Blacklists Wuhan Virology Lab". American Institute of Physics. 30 April 2020. Retrieved 12 February 2021.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  32. ^ "Wuhan investigation doesn't dramatically change picture of outbreak, WHO official says". The Guardian. 9 February 2021. The lab leak hypothesis is an extremely unlikely pathway for COVID-19 and will not require further study as part of their work in studying the origins of the virus, Embarek says.
  33. ^ Mallapaty, Smriti; Maxmen, Amy; Callaway, Ewen (10 February 2021). "'Major stones unturned': COVID origin search must continue after WHO report, say scientists". Nature. 590 (7846): 371–372. doi:10.1038/d41586-021-00375-7. PMID 33574591.
  34. ^ Fujiyama, Emily Wang; Moritsugu, Ken (11 February 2021). "EXPLAINER: What the WHO coronavirus experts learned in Wuhan". AP News. Retrieved 12 February 2021.
  35. ^ "Intelligence on Sick Staff at Wuhan Lab Fuels Debate on Covid-19 Origin". The Wall Street Journal. 23 May 2021. Three researchers from China's Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in November 2019 that they sought hospital care, according to a previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence report that could add weight to growing calls for a fuller probe of whether the Covid-19 virus may have escaped from the laboratory.
  36. ^ "Fauci bombshell: 'Not convinced' COVID-19 developed naturally outside Wuhan lab". The Hill. 24 May 2021. I think we should continue to investigate what went on in China.
  37. ^ "Administration". Wuhan Institute of Virology, CAS. Archived from the original on 29 July 2019. Retrieved 26 January 2020.
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