Saranac Lake, NY —Trudeau Institute will continue work to help its global partners develop vaccines and treatments for future COVID-19 variants, as well as prepare for outbreaks of other pandemics, through a grant funded by the F.M. Kirby Foundation.
The $45,000 grant has been awarded to Dr. William Reiley’s group to further characterize a recently identified mouse strain in his lab which is highly susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 infection. While existing mouse models have aided scientists in the development of vaccines and treatments against COVID-19, those models do not accurately depict acute life threatening COVID-19 disease as seen in humans, nor lasting effects seen in COVID-19 “long-haulers”.
“Our existing model is just too limited,” Dr. Reiley said. “Because of this, researchers have been hampered in their ability to understand the immune responses as they relate to control of virus replication, the viral dysregulation of the immune response, identify biomarkers of disease, and interrogate novel therapeutic targets.”
New Research Suggests White-Tailed Deer May Be Highly Susceptible to COVID-19
The bioRxiv-published report details a study conducted by an interdisciplinary team of researchers led by Penn State University (PSU) scientists. The team examined 131 free-ranging white-tailed deer, all living on Staten Island, the most suburban of the 5 New York City boroughs. Nineteen tested positive for COVID antibodies, indicating that the deer had prior exposure to the virus and, according to the researchers, implying that they are vulnerable to repeated re-infections with new variants.
The report has not yet been certified by peer review, but has been published as a pre-print because of the significance of the findings, according to Suresh Kuchipudi, an American College of Veterinary Microbiologists (ACVM) board-certified specialist in virology and immunology at the Department of Veterinary and Biological Sciences at PSU. He serves as associate director of PSU’s Animal Diagnostic Laboratory where, as head of microbiology, he oversees the University’s bacteriology, virology, serology, and molecular diagnostic units. Kuchipudi has expressed concern that spillover of omicron from humans to deer could result in new and possibly vaccine-resistant mutations of the virus evolving undetected in non-human hosts and noted that one of the infected deer in the study had antibodies from a previous COVID-19 infection; indicating that deer, like humans, can experience breakthrough cases.
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