Another Fatal Monkey Virus Could Be Poised for Spillover to Humans

Citing parallels to HIV, the authors name on the worldwide well being group to be vigilant.

An obscure household of viruses, already endemic in wild African primates and recognized to trigger lethal Ebola-like signs in some monkeys, is “on the verge of spreading” to people, in keeping with new analysis. The research, carried out by the College of Colorado at Boulder, was revealed on-line within the journal Cell September 30.

Though these arteriviruses are already thought of a essential risk to macaque monkeys, no human infections have been reported to this point. Additionally, it is unclear what affect the virus would have on individuals if it jumped species.

Nevertheless, the authors, pointing to parallels with HIV (whose precursor originated in African apes), however urge vigilance: By monitoring arteriviruses now, each in animals and people, the worldwide well being group might probably keep away from one other pandemic, they stated. .

“This animal virus has discovered tips on how to get into human cells, multiply and evade a number of the vital immune mechanisms that we might anticipate to guard us from an animal virus. That is fairly uncommon,” stated the Lead writer Sara Sawyer. She’s a professor of molecular, mobile, and developmental biology at CU Boulder. “We should always take note of that.”

There are literally thousands of distinctive viruses circulating amongst animals world wide, and most of them trigger no signs within the host. An rising variety of these viruses have crossed over to people in current many years, wreaking havoc on naïve immune programs with no expertise to struggle them. This contains Center East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) in 2012, Extreme Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (SARS-CoV) in 2003 and[{” attribute=””>SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) in 2020.

Sara Sawyer. Credit; UC Boulder

For 15 years, Sawyer’s lab has used laboratory techniques and tissue samples from wildlife from around the globe to investigate which animal viruses may be prone to jump to humans.

For the latest study, she and first author Cody Warren, then a postdoctoral fellow at the BioFrontiers Institute at CU, zeroed in on arteriviruses. These are common among pigs and horses but understudied among nonhuman primates. Specifically, they looked at simian hemorrhagic fever virus (SHFV), which causes a lethal disease similar to the Ebola virus disease. Dating back to the 1960s, it has been causing deadly outbreaks in captive macaque colonies.

According to the research, a molecule, or receptor, called CD163, is crucial to the biology of simian arteriviruses, enabling the virus to invade and cause infection of target cells. Through a series of laboratory experiments, the scientists discovered, much to their surprise, that the virus was also remarkably skilled at latching on to the human version of CD163, getting inside human cells, and quickly making copies of itself.

Like human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and its precursor simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), simian arteriviruses also appear to attack immune cells. This means they can disable key defense mechanisms and take hold in the body long-term.

“The similarities are profound between this virus and the simian viruses that gave rise to the HIV pandemic,” said Warren. He is now an assistant professor in the College of Veterinary Medicine at The Ohio State University.

The authors stress that another pandemic is not imminent, and the public should not be alarmed.

However, they do suggest that the global health community prioritize the further study of simian arteriviruses and develop blood antibody tests for them. They should also consider surveillance of human populations with close contact with animal carriers.

An expansive variety of African monkeys already carry high viral loads of diverse arteriviruses, often without symptoms. Additionally, some species frequently interact with humans and are known to bite and scratch people.

“Just because we haven’t diagnosed a human arterivirus infection yet doesn’t mean that no human has been exposed. We haven’t been looking,” said Warren.

Warren and Sawyer note that in the 1970s, no one had heard of HIV either.

Scientists now know that HIV likely originated from SIVs infecting nonhuman primates in Africa, likely jumping to humans sometime in the early 1900s.

When it began killing young men in the United States in the 1980s, no serology test existed, and no treatments were in the works.

Sawyer said there is no guarantee that these simian arteriviruses will jump to humans. But one thing is for sure: More viruses will jump to humans, and they will cause disease.

“COVID is just the latest in a long string of spillover events from animals to humans, some of which have erupted into global catastrophes,” Sawyer said. “Our hope is that by raising awareness of the viruses that we should be looking out for, we can get ahead of this so that if human infections begin to occur, we’re on it quickly.”

Reference: “Primate hemorrhagic fever-causing arteriviruses are poised for spillover to humans” by Cody J. Warren, Shuiqing Yu, Douglas K. Peters, Arturo Barbachano-Guerrero, Qing Yang, Bridget L. Burris, Gabriella Worwa, I-Chueh Huang, Gregory K. Wilkerson, Tony L. Goldberg, Jens H. Kuhn and Sara L. Sawyer, 30 September 2022, Cell.
DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2022.09.022