Scientists in the Johns Hopkins University (JHU) Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) (www.jhuapl.edu) Research and Exploratory Development (RED) Mission Area have developed a device to allow researchers to drastically reduce the time it takes to mimic the natural evolution of a virus in the laboratory.
This device or tool, the droplet-based Rapid Acceleration of Laboratory Evolution (oRACLE) Chip can potentially improve the ability to interdict emerging diseases reports RED’s researcher Andrew Feldman. He adds, “It can also be used to address challenges concerning bacterial drug resistance, food safety, and biological weapons defense.”
The research is being done within the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Prophecy Program. This program with a team led by APL and Harvard University, is developing methods to predict how and how fast, viruses might mutate.
The goal is to outrun Mother Nature. Scientists can grow viruses in a test tube filled with a cell culture and then transfer some of the virus into another test tube. However, this is time-consuming and costly since conventional high throughput bioanalysis is needed to study 50 million distinct evolution experiments, and this would take about two years and cost more than $25 million. The oRACLE Chip can reduce that process to a few days with much lower material costs.
“The oRACLE Chip allows scientists to quickly propagate millions of parallel passages of a virus over several generations in a short time by automating work that would have taken years to perform by hand into just hours,” said Feldman. “Further evolving millions of independent viral lineages may allow the device to predict evolutionary mutations in advance of their occurrence.”
It is reported that such experiments not only enable quantifying the risk that a particular antiviral drug will fail and when, but they can produce the actual future escaping viruses, provide the targets to develop new drugs to enable a proactive approach to interdicting an emerging threat.
Last May NIH announced a grant to fund five “Centers of Excellence for Influenza Research and Surveillance” (CEIRS) including a $76 million center at JHU to develop innovative ways to identify and track influenza viruses worldwide. Scientists at the JHU CEIRS, partnering with Harvard are going to leverage the oRACLE Chip to rapidly identify new influenza virus strains.
The Johns Hopkins CEIRS team hopes to improve the response to influenza epidemics and pandemics by isolating and characterizing new influenza virus strains faster and earlier in the flu season giving scientists more time to generate vaccines and formulate public health intervention policies. The oRACLE Chip will be integral to that effort.
DARPA is also providing funds to APL to continue to apply the tool to study noroviruses, the human influenza virus, and study the virus that causes dengue fever. According to Feldman, the system count single bacteria in the drops with a drug could rapidly determine whether they are multiplying. This technology can rapidly determine if a bacterium is drug resistant so that the oRACLE Chip can be an important new tool to use to manage drug resistant infections.