Step-by-step horsepox study intensifies dual-use research debate
Vaccinia vaccine using dual-use research
Evans said the goal of the research was to understand recombinant viruses and develop new vaccines. Also published last Friday was research from the same group showing that mice were successfully immunized against vaccinia virus using the horsepox-developed vaccine.
Controversial “dual-use” research refers to studies that can be used for both beneficial and nefarious purposes.
“We have very old vaccine technologies that date back to the 1980s,” Evans said. “They work but are clunky if you are trying to really modify a virus, so we were interested in taking advantage of technology and developing better tools.”
Evans said his team worked with advisors with Canada’s federal government who approved the work. He also said that although he may have been the first to recreate HPX, he’s not the only scientists capable of doing so.
“There are publications on how to reactivate pox viruses dating back to the 1970s and 1980s,” said Evans. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to produce a pox virus. I worry about the people that say you’ve provided a blueprint. Implicit in that is that other scientists couldn’t do it. But many could. They don’t need blueprints.”
Still, the paper concludes with a warning: “Most viruses could be assembled nowadays using reverse genetics, and these methods have been combined with gene synthesis technologies to assemble poliovirus and other extinct pathogens like the 1918 influenza strain… our studies show that it is clearly accessible to current synthetic biology technology, with important implications for public health and biosecurity.”
Koblentz said that any dual-use research must consider what could be gained from the work. In this particular instance, Koblentz said there is no need to use this data to create new smallpox vaccines, and the paper’s suggestion that the work could be embraced as a tool to develop new oncolytic agents is far-fetched.
“The benefits promised by the research are illusory, unneeded, and unlikely even,” said Koblentz. “They’re trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.”
Many scientists agree that this particular line of research is not worth the risk.
As Kai Kupferschmidt points out in Science Magazine, some scientists are worried about this research. He quotes Stephan Becker from the University of Marburg in Germany, who says safe vaccines exist and that there’s no market for a horsepox-based replacement. And as Andreas Nitsche of the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin told Kupferschmidt, “If anyone wants to recreate another poxvirus, they now have the instructions to do that in one place.”
Gizmodo notes that, strangely, the two Canadian scientists did not discuss any safe alternatives, such as a weakened vaccinia strain called Modified Vaccinia Ankara (MVA) or a similar vaccine developed in Japan called LC16m8.
