The Global Viroma Project (GVP for its acronym in English, Global Virome Project) is an international collaboration initiative, launched in 2018, which aims to understand the global diversity of viruses present in wildlife on Earth. Its objective is to develop a network of organizations that intends to detect the majority of unknown viral threats to health and food safety in order to be prepared and know how to stop future pandemics.
The GVP launched its ‘letter of introduction’ to the world in an article published in the journal Science in 2018 and in which the authors affirmed, in a very clairvoyant way, how vulnerable we are to emerging diseases, many of them with economic and economic impacts. mass health: “Our set of adaptation tools, based largely on vaccines and therapies, is often ineffective because the development of countermeasures can be outpaced by the speed of emergence and spread of new viruses,” they indicated in the article. “ After each outbreak, public health authorities lament the lack of foresight , but after decades of reacting to each event with a very poor focus on mitigation, we remain unprotected against the next epidemic. Our ability to mitigate the occurrence of disease is undermined by our poor understanding of the diversity and ecology of viral threats and the drivers of their emergence. “
From a reactive approach to a proactive strategy
The idea is to radically change the approach to fighting new diseases and move from a reactive strategy, which consists of reducing their impact after their appearance, to a proactive strategy that allows anticipating the next threats through knowledge and characterization of viruses that can potentially harm us.
According to its promoters, science and technology already offer us the appropriate tools to carry out a project of such magnitude: bioinformatics, for example, allows the efficient search for new strategies to develop vaccines, antivirals and all kinds of countermeasures that are ready for future epidemics. Furthermore, it is imperative to strengthen global and local capacities to monitor and respond to viral threats while they are still evolving in animal populations to allow better prevention of their spread.
The idea of the GVP began to take shape in 2016, after outbreaks of viruses such as SARS, Ebola and Zika, which showed that we are not prepared and that we are extremely against emerging viral diseases. Since the mid-20th century, new and deadly diseases have emerged at an alarming rate and the threats from this vast group of unknown viruses are accelerating exponentially, driven by our expanding population and global travel.
According to their officials, around 1.6 million different viruses circulate in wildlife, and between 631,000 and 827,000 of them could be zoonotic. In addition, due to global change we are increasingly exposed to these viruses, so the threats are multiplying. The fundamental problem is that the investment required to characterize and understand such viral diversity is enormous. Paradoxically, and as Mike Davis explains in the book The Monster Arrives (Ed. Captain Swing), a few months before the appearance of the Wuhan outbreak, the Trump administration substantially reduced funding for the Predict project of the Emerging Pandemic Threats Program. This program can be considered the precedent of the GVP, since many of the researchers who worked in it are part of the Global Virome Project, and it was a pioneering viral early warning system, as well as a program to help the training of medical professionals to recognize new infections and monitor zoonoses.
The Global Virome Project in the COVID-19 pandemic
For those responsible for the GVP, it would take at least ten years and an investment of more than a billion dollars to identify 75% of the unknown viruses that exist. The effort, of course, would be worth it, because if we had had this data, it is very likely that COVID-19 could have been contained long before its explosion in Wuhan.
The research carried out by Predict scientists, in fact, allowed the identification of dozens of new coronaviruses, and some of them have been used, for example, to test remdesivir, currently the only retroviral approved for use against COVID-19 In the USA.
” We will know that there are potential new pandemics, because in fact the viruses that can cause them are already circulating in nature, ” said Dennis Carroll, director of the GVP, in an interview for the Financial Times in October 2020. For this researcher, no there is reason for such catastrophic events as that caused by SARS-CoV-2 to occur again, since with a well-coordinated global viral surveillance early warning network, future pandemic events could be prevented.
