Wuhan Institute of Virology

The Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (WIV; Chinese: 中国科学院武汉病毒研究所) is a research institute on virology administered by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). Located in Jiangxia District, Wuhan, Hubei, it opened mainland China's first biosafety level 4 (BSL–4) laboratory in 2015.[2] The Institute has strong ties to the Galveston National Laboratory in the United States, the Centre International de Recherche en Infectiologie in France and the National Microbiology Laboratory in Canada.

Wuhan Institute of Virology
中国科学院武汉病毒研究所
AbbreviationWIV
Predecessor
  • Wuhan Microbiology Laboratory
  • South China Institute of Microbiology
  • Wuhan Microbiology Institute
  • Microbiology Institute of Hubei Province
Formation1956
FounderChen Huagui, Gao Shangyin
HeadquartersXiaohongshan, Wuchang District, Wuhan, Hubei, China
Coordinates30°22′35″N 114°15′45″E
Director-General
Wang Yanyi
Secretary of Party Committee
Xiao Gengfu[1]
Deputy Director-General
Gong Peng, Guan Wuxiang, Xiao Gengfu
Parent organization
Chinese Academy of Sciences
Websitewhiov.cas.cn
Wuhan Institute of Virology
Simplified Chinese中国科学院武汉病毒研究所
Traditional Chinese中國科學院武漢病毒研究所

The institute has been an active research center for the study of coronaviruses. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has been the subject of multiple conspiracy theories about the origin of the virus.[3][4][5] There is however no evidence backing the conspiracy claims,[3] with scientists noting that "the available data argue overwhelmingly against any scientific misconduct or negligence".[6] Virologists interviewed by NPR have said that there is virtually no chance that the virus emerged from a lab.[7]

History

The WIV was founded in 1956 as the Wuhan Microbiology Laboratory under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). In 1961, it became the South China Institute of Microbiology, and in 1962 was renamed Wuhan Microbiology Institute. In 1970, it became the Microbiology Institute of Hubei Province when the Hubei Commission of Science and Technology took over the administration. In June 1978, it was returned to the CAS and renamed Wuhan Institute of Virology.[8]

In 2003, the Chinese academy of Sciences approved the construction of China's first biosafety level 4 (BSL–4) laboratory at the WIV. The construction of the WIV's National Bio-safety Laboratory was completed at a cost of 300 million yuan ($44 million) in collaboration with the French government's CIRI lab at the end of 2014.[2][9]

The National Bio-safety Laboratory has strong ties to the Galveston National Laboratory in the University of Texas.[10] It also had strong ties with Canada's National Microbiology Laboratory until WIV staff scientists Xiangguo Qiu and her husband Keding Cheng, who were also remunerated by the Canadian government, were escorted from the Canadian lab for undisclosed reasons in July 2019.[11]

The WIV has been a topic of controversy since the start of reporting of the COVID-19 pandemic. Scientists such as U.S. molecular biologist Richard H. Ebright, who had expressed concern of previous escapes of the SARS virus at Chinese laboratories in Beijing and had been troubled by the pace and scale of China's plans for expansion into BSL–4 laboratories,[2] called the Institute a "world-class research institution that does world-class research in virology and immunology" while he noted that the WIV is a world leader in the study of bat coronaviruses.[10]

Coronavirus research

In 2005, a group including researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology published research into the origin of the SARS coronavirus, finding that China's horseshoe bats are natural reservoirs of SARS-like coronaviruses.[12] Continuing this work over a period of years, researchers from the Institute sampled thousands of horseshoe bats in locations across China, isolating over 300 bat coronavirus sequences.[13]

In 2015, an international team including two scientists from the Institute published successful research on whether a bat coronavirus could be made to infect HeLa. The team engineered a hybrid virus, combining a bat coronavirus with a SARS virus that had been adapted to grow in mice and mimic human disease. The hybrid virus was able to infect human cells.[14][15]

In 2017, a team from the Institute announced that coronaviruses found in horseshoe bats at a cave in Yunnan contain all the genetic pieces of the SARS virus, and hypothesized that the direct progenitor of the human virus originated in this cave. The team, who spent five years sampling the bats in the cave, noted the presence of a village only a kilometer away, and warned of "the risk of spillover into people and emergence of a disease similar to SARS".[13][16]

In 2018, another paper by a team from the Institute reported the results of a serological study of a sample of villagers residing near these bat caves (near Xiyang Township 夕阳乡 in Jinning District of Yunnan). According to this report, 6 out of the 218 local residents in the sample carried antibodies to the bat coronaviruses in their blood, indicating the possibility of transmission of the infections from bats to people.[17]

COVID-19 pandemic
Main article: COVID-19 pandemic

In December 2019, cases of pneumonia associated with an unknown coronavirus were reported to health authorities in Wuhan. The Institute checked its coronavirus collection and found the new virus had 96% genetic similarity to RaTG13, a virus its researchers had discovered in horseshoe bats in southwest China.[18]

As the virus spread worldwide, the Institute continued its investigation. In February 2020, the New York Times reported that a team led by Shi Zhengli at the Institute were the first to identify, analyze and name the genetic sequence of the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV), and upload it to public databases for scientists around the world to understand,[19][20] and publishing papers in Nature.[21] On 19 February, 2020, the lab released a letter on its website describing how they successfully obtained the whole virus genome: "On the evening of December 30, 2019, after receiving the unexplained pneumonia samples sent by Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital, our institute organized the strength overnight and worked for 72 hours to solve the problem. On January 2, 2020, the whole genome sequence of the new coronavirus was determined".[22] In February 2020, the Institute applied for a patent in China for the use of remdesivir, an experimental drug owned by Gilead Sciences, which the Institute found inhibited the virus in vitro;[23] in a move that raised concerns regarding intellectual property rights.[24] The WIV said it would not exercise its new Chinese patent rights "if relevant foreign companies intend to contribute to the prevention and control of China’s epidemic".[25]

Concerns as source

In January 2020, conspiracy theories circulated that the COVID-19 pandemic originated from viruses engineered by the WIV, which were refuted on the basis of scientific evidence that the virus has natural origins.[10][26][27][28][29] In mid-January, U.S. intelligence agencies reported to U.S. officials that they had not detected any alarm within the Chinese government that would suggest the outbreak had emerged from a government laboratory.[30] In an opinion column in the Washington Post, Josh Rogin wrote that US State Department cables from 2018 raised safety concerns about WIV's research on bat coronaviruses.[31] In April 2020, at the request of Trump administration officials, U.S. intelligence agencies began investigating whether the outbreak originated from the accidental exposure by WIV scientists studying natural coronaviruses in bats.[32][30][33] The New York Times reported that senior officials in the Trump administration were pressuring intelligence agencies to find evidence for the unsubstantiated theory that the virus leaked from the laboratory, leading to concern among some intelligence analysts that intelligence assessments would be distorted to serve a political campaign to lay blame on China for the outbreak.[34] US President Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have claimed to have evidence of the lab theory, but have offered no further details.[35][36][37][38]

Leading virologists have disputed the idea that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from the institute.[7][39] The virologist Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance, which studies emerging infectious diseases, has had a 15-year collaboration with Shi Zhengli, a leading WIV virologist, to study bat coronaviruses.[40] Daszak noted estimates that millions of people who live or work in proximity to bats in Southeast Asia are infected each year with bat coronaviruses.[7][39] In an interview with Vox, Daszak comments, "There are probably half a dozen people that do work in those labs. So let's compare 1 million to 7 million people a year to half a dozen people; it's just not logical."[39] Jonna Mazet, Professor of epidemiology at the University of California, Davis and director of the PREDICT project to monitor emerging viruses, has commented that staff at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were trained by U.S. scientists as part of the PREDICT program and follow high safety standards, and that "All of the evidence points to this not being a laboratory accident."[7]

Research centers

The Institute contains the following research centers:[41]

  • Center for Emerging Infectious Disease
  • Chinese Virus Resources and Bioinformatics Center
  • Center of Applied and Environmental Microbiology
  • Department of Analytical Biochemistry and Biotechnology
  • Department of Molecular Virology

See also

References
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