In 1918, the bloodiest war at that time ended. This year also marked the beginning of a new war. Having put an end to the mass murder among people, nature took this prerogative upon itself and began to wreak havoc. The 1918-1919 influenza epidemic claimed between 20 and 40 million lives, more than the First World War, and killed more people in one year than the bubonic plague in four years.
"For four and a half years medicine has devoted itself to keeping people on the line of fire," wrote the 1918 Journal of the American Medical Association. "Now she must unleash all her might on the worst enemy of all - infectious diseases."
Could such a deadly virus be reborn? Yes. The question is whether we will be ready for this.
Speaking at a conference on exponential medicine at Singularity University, Dr. George Post suggested that we are not paying enough attention to the risk of another global pandemic.
“We've been pacified by the constant focus on global infectious diseases,” Post says. "We have an inadequate state of threat surveillance."
Post is Professor of Healthcare Innovation and Chief Scientist for Adaptive Systems at Arizona State University. In his speech, he outlined diseases around the world over the past decade. From the Chikungunya virus to Ebola and Zika, the doctor says, dormant diseases are flaring up and new ones continuing to emerge. The latest Ebola epidemic killed 10,000 people and the Zika virus is spreading rapidly.
Bad viruses are growing fast. “It's kind of an arms race,” Post says.
The biggest problem, Post says, is how quickly we can deploy our defenses. Speed is of the utmost importance. But when it comes to developing and producing vaccines, there is no speed. Diagnostic tests are developed up to one year; vaccines - from three to ten years.
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Even if we threw all our vaccine production capabilities into the fight against one virus, the total capacity would be about 900 million doses for a population of 7 billion.
To effectively combat a future pandemic-potential virus - The Post calls him Agent X - we need to answer the following questions:
- How to find out what to defend against?
- How to produce a new vaccine?
- How to distribute medicines?
- How to make them available?
He believes that new technologies like rapid genome sequencing, advanced computing and protein engineering will lead to faster and more efficient solutions in the future.
Vaccine manufacturing is largely biological, Post notes. The virus we are interested in is the starting point for a new vaccine. This process needs to be accelerated by building molecular components of vaccines from scratch.
To do this, Post says, we will need powerful computers to analyze, model, and catalog the molecular structure that stimulates immunity. This immunological library will outline the rules for dealing with new invaders.
"If Agent X gets to us - and if we have these rules at hand - we can sequence the genome of Agent X in a matter of days, even hours," Post says. This genome will tell us which proteins the virus produces and which antigens we need to synthesize.
Then we will need to use our ability to alter proteins and engineer the vaccine itself.
Post says that this is the world we are moving towards, even if it is still unnoticed. It takes a lot of computing power to analyze the complex three-dimensional structures of proteins and determine how they fold, and the chemical synthesis of proteins remains a major challenge for scientists.
But as genome sequencing, computing power, and protein engineering evolve and converge, a world that can respond quickly and broadly to future viral threats awaits. By effectively leveraging globally distributed chemical industries and with a clear vaccine production plan, we could expand production capacity to hundreds of millions or billions of doses.
ILYA KHEL