Kei Sato was looking for his next big challenge five years ago when it smacked him — and the world — in the face. The virologist had recently started an independent group at the University of Tokyo and was trying to carve out a niche in the crowded field of HIV research. “I thought, ‘What can I do for the next 20 or 30 years?’”
He found an answer in SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, that was rapidly spreading around the world. In March 2020, as rumors swirled that Tokyo might face a lockdown that would stop research activities, Sato and five students decamped to a former adviser’s laboratory in Kyoto. There, they began studying a viral protein that SARS-CoV-2 uses to quell the body’s earliest immune responses. Sato soon established a consortium of researchers that would go on to publish at least 50 studies on the virus.
In just five years, SARS-CoV-2 became one of the most closely examined viruses on the planet. Researchers have published about 150,000 research articles about it, according to the citation database Scopus. That’s roughly three times the number of papers published on HIV in the same period. Scientists have also generated more than 17 million SARS-CoV-2 genome sequences so far, more than for any other organism. This has given an unparalleled view into the ways in which the virus changed as infections spread. “There was an opportunity to see a pandemic in real time in much higher resolution than has ever been achievable before,” says Tom Peacock, a virologist at the Pirbright Institute, near Woking, UK.
Now, with the emergency phase of the pandemic in the rear-view mirror, virologists are taking stock of what can be learned about a virus in such a short amount of time, including its evolution and its interactions with human hosts. Here are four lessons from the pandemic that some say could empower the global response to future pandemics — but only if scientific and public health institutions are in place to use them.
Viral sequences tell stories
On 11 January 2020, Edward Holmes, a virologist at the University of Sydney, Australia, shared what most scientists consider to be the first SARS-CoV-2 genome sequence to a virology discussion board; he had received the data from virologist Zhang Yongzhen in China.
By the year’s end, scientists had submitted more than 300,000 sequences to a repository known as the Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data (GISAID). The rate of data collection only got faster from there as troubling variants of the virus took hold. Some countries plowed enormous resources into sequencing SARS-CoV-2: between them, the United Kingdom and the United States contributed more than 8.5 million (see ‘Viral genome rally’). Meanwhile, scientists in other countries, including South Africa, India and Brazil, showed that efficient surveillance can spot worrying variants in lower-resource settings.
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