Deadly flu pandemics can arise when influenza viruses circulating in animals acquire the ability to jump to humans. In work published today in the open-access journal eLife, scientists at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center comprehensively mapped the alterations in a key influenza protein that allow bird flu to grow better in people.
The map could help scientists better understand which changes enable flu to jump species and may presage a new pandemic, said flu researcher Dr. Shirleen Soh, a postdoctoral fellow working in the lab of Hutch computational biologist Dr. Jesse Bloom. This understanding, in turn, would be a step toward heading off pandemics by pinpointing which viruses should be targeted with a vaccine.
Though scientists can collect and sequence viruses circulating in the world, “we have no idea how that information translates into how well a particular virus is going to do in a human host,” Soh said. Comprehensive maps of mutations that enable bird flu to grow well in human cells “are one way to build a better model for understanding which viruses might do well [in people] or not.”
