Advertise With UsAdvertise on our extensive network of industry websites and newsletters.
Get the PBR newsletterSign up to our free email to get all the latest PBR
news.The Influenza Genome Sequencing Project, funded by the US National Institutes of Health, has achieved a major milestone, having completed and made public the entire genetic blueprints of more than 2,000 human and avian influenza viruses taken from samples around the world.
Subscribe to our email newsletter
“This information will help scientists understand how influenza viruses evolve and spread,” commented NIH director Dr Elias Zerhouni, “and it will aid in the development of new flu vaccines, therapies and diagnostics.”
“Scientists around the world can use the sequence data to compare different strains of the virus, identify the genetic factors that determine their virulence, and look for new therapeutic, vaccine and diagnostic targets,” says NIAID director Dr Anthony Fauci.
The Influenza Genome Sequencing Project, initiated in 2004, has been carried out at the NIAID-funded Microbial Sequencing Center managed by The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) of Rockville, Maryland.
Recently, growing sequencing capacity has enabled the production rate to increase to more than 200 viral genomes per month. Eclipsing this milestone of 2,000 genomes, the microbial sequencing center will continue to rapidly sequence more influenza strains and isolates and will make all the sequence data freely available to the scientific community and the public through GenBank, an Internet-accessible database of genetic sequences maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at NIH’s National Library of Medicine, another major contributor to the project.
Seasonal influenza is a major public health concern in the US, accounting for approximately 36,000 deaths and 200,000 hospitalizations each year. Globally, influenza results in an estimated 250,000 to half a million deaths annually. Seasonal flu shots are updated every year to target the latest strains in circulation. Developing such vaccines is challenging, however, because the influenza virus is prone to high mutation rates when it replicates, and these mutations can alter the virus enough that vaccines against one strain may not protect against another strain.
An even greater concern is the potential for an influenza pandemic caused by the emergence of a new, highly lethal virus strain that is easily transmitted from person to person. Influenza pandemics have occurred three times in the last century, the most lethal of which was the pandemic of 1918, which caused an estimated 40 to 50 million deaths worldwide.