Dr. James Crowe
Dr. James Crowe has watched public health officials scramble each time a new virus surfaces. The director of the Vanderbilt Center for Antibody Therapeutics and his researchers are working on a new strategy they’re calling AHEAD 100: get treatments ready for the 100 viruses most likely to cause a pandemic. They do this by producing antibodies — the proteins created by the human body to fight viruses.
The lab had produced antibodies for the hantavirus not long before a variation of the virus caused three deaths and several illnesses aboard a cruise ship in May. His team also prepared a treatment several years ago for the Bundibugyo virus, a strain of ebola responsible for a recent outbreak that caused more than 100 deaths in Congo over the past month.
The catch is, while Crowe’s lab can systematically prepare antibodies — and has done so for around 40 of its 100 targeted viruses — it takes $40 million to put each one through clinical trials and prepare it for the public. Crowe says he hasn’t been able to get traction to prepare all 100, which would take $3 billion to $4 billion, so his team is writing grants for one at a time. Crowe spoke with the Scene about his research process and predictions for future outbreaks.
What are you watching out for right now when it comes to viruses?
If a person comes in contact with mosquitoes or ticks or an animal like a bat, an animal virus can cross over. Typically animal viruses don’t grow very well in humans, but some of them do, and then some of them will mutate after they are in one person, so that they gain the capacity to do human-to-human transmission. And that’s when you get really concerning outbreaks.
What we used to do is try to think, “Maybe we can guess the next one.” I’ve sort of given up on that question, because it’s impossible to predict the next one. We switched from trying to think of a short list of the next ones to this program we called AHEAD100.
What does it take for the antibody therapy to be fit for public use?
There’s different stages in drug or vaccine development, and we specialize in the very front end. A virus occurs, we go all over the world and find someone who has survived that. We enroll them in a research project under informed consent. If people want to participate, they give us blood, and then we sort through the white blood cells — sample through millions of cells, looking for a needle in a haystack, and we find a B-cell [i.e., a type of white blood cell] that’s rare in that person, but probably helped them survive it.
Once we have the genes, it’s like a recipe, and we can essentially go to the lab or even a factory and use that gene from one person to make the exact same natural antibody and give it to other people. People call that the discovery phase or the research phase.
The next step is to prepare it so that it would be safe to give to another person, and that’s where we usually get stuck, because that next step is about $40 million.
What are your thoughts on the hantavirus?
We had great antibodies, and the government knows we had them, because we did it under a government grant. … They just decided that the outbreak would be contained with public health measures — so quarantine and distancing and all that — and it probably will contain it.
In the last several months we had already made antibodies for measles, and there was a big measles outbreak in the United States. We had already done hantavirus — there’s an outbreak on a ship. Two weeks later there is a big Bundibugyo virus outbreak. We’d already done that. I’m not happy that the outbreaks are occurring, but I would say that it validates the strategy of AHEAD100, because if you have 100, then the one that outbreaks is going to be on your list, and that happened the last three outbreaks. We were ready, we had the drug — it’s just we did not have the manufactured drug materials.
Should this funding come from private entities or the government?
I think it’s going to take commercial parties, the government and nonprofits to all partner together with different pools of money to get this done.
Is there anything else you want to add?
I acknowledge that it feels tiresome to have to keep talking about infectious diseases. People don’t want to talk about it more, and they wish it would go away, but the problem is the viruses aren’t listening. The viruses are going to happen anyway. I think we have to acknowledge that everyone’s fatigued with thinking about it, but that doesn’t justify not doing anything about it. We wish we didn’t have to worry about this, but the fact is we do.
