The new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 is the latest pathogen that has ‘spread’ from animals to humans, but hundreds of thousands of other viruses lurking in animals can pose a similar threat. A new online tool arranges viruses according to their potential to jump from animals to humans and cause pandemics.
The tool, called SpillOver, essentially creates a ‘watch list’ of newly discovered animal viruses that pose the greatest threat to human health. The researchers hope that their tools for open access can be used by other scientists, policymakers and public health officials to prioritize viruses for further study, surveillance and risk-reducing activities, such as possibly developing vaccinations or medicines before a disease spreads.
“SARS-CoV-2 is just one example of thousands of viruses that can be there to transmit from animals to humans,” said Zoë Grange, who led the development of SpillOver as a postdoctoral researcher at the One Health Institute at The University of California , Davis (UC Davis), said in a statement. “We must not only identify viral threats with the greatest spread risk, but also prioritize them before another devastating pandemic occurs.”
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About 250 viruses are known to be ‘zoonotic’, meaning they have already been transmitted from animals to humans, and an estimated 500,000 viruses have a potential for spread, the researchers wrote in an article on the SpillOver tool. which was published Monday (April 5). in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. But every virus is unlikely to jump from animals to humans as quickly. The researchers therefore created a “credit-like” score for viruses as a way to assess and compare their risks.
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To arrive at the score, the instrument considers 32 risk factors associated with the virus and the host, such as how many animal species infect the virus and how often people interact with wild animals in the areas where the virus has been detected.
Thereafter, the researchers used the tool to rank 887 wild-type viruses based on their spread risk. (Most of the viruses on the rankings have been newly discovered, but some are known to be zoonotic.)
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The top 12 viruses on the list were known zoonotic pathogens, with Lassa virus first, SARS-CoV-2 and Ebola virus third. (The main animal host for the Lassa virus is rats and the main host for Ebola virus is probably bats. The main animal hosts for SARS-CoV-2 are unknown, but the virus has been found to infect minks, lions and tigers.)
The authors said that they expect this result – known zoonotic position above – and use it to validate the instrument.
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But given the current widespread threat to human health, why did SARS-CoV-2 not take first place? The researchers said their instrument has the potential for future distributional events. Some important information about SARS-CoV-2 remains unknown, such as the number of host species that infect it, and it may reach its peak as researchers learn more about it, the authors said.
Among viruses not yet zoonotic, the top-ranked virus was coronavirus 229E (bat strain), which belongs to the same viral family as SARS-CoV-2 and infects bats in Africa, according to SpillOver. Another top-ranking virus is coronavirus PREDICT CoV-35, which also belongs to the coronavirus family and infects bats in Africa and Southeast Asia.
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The authors noted that SpillOver is a crowdsourcing platform that enables other researchers to contribute data on viruses that are already on the list, or to add viruses to the list, and may change the rankings as new data is added word.
“This tool is intended to launch a global dialogue that will enable us to go beyond what we have thought in the past about viruses, and to allow real-time scientific collaboration to anticipate new threats early on. identify, “said Jonna Mazet, a professor studying at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, in the statement. “SpillOver can help advance our understanding of viral health threats and enable us to reduce the risk of spread before pandemics can catch fire.”
This article originally appeared on LiveScience.