Novel Way To Identify Animal Viruses that May Affect Humans

As per a study published in PLOS One, there exist a vast number of viruses that are life-threatening for animals but does not affect humans but the possibility may be there that it might have an impact on human health in near future. John Drake, Distinguished Research Professor of Ecology and director of the Center for the Ecology of Infectious Diseases at the University of Georgia and his team have unveiled a novel procedure to predict which of the animal pathogens may have the potential to affect humans too and can be transferable from person to person.

Over 200 biotech researchers from both private and public labs are expected to collect in Bangalore from January 2019 to kick-start a brand new collection of events to create synergies between domestic centers and private businesses to propel the nation toward the 100 billion BioEconomy by leveraging on each other’s strengths. The event is being coordinated by the Association of Biotechnology Led Enterprises (ABLE). 

As per John Drake, upon experimenting over novel pathogens that affect humans, a common conclusion was that those pathogens already existed in the animal kingdom and was circulated widely. This made them think about the procedure, how the lethal pathogens interact with their hosts. They believe the host-pathogen interacting procedure might be the key to understand how the pathogens get transmitted interspecies.

Drake and his team in order to analyze these host-pathogen interactions have aggregated data listing the names of viruses known to infect humans along with its biological characteristics. The outcome is one of the worlds most comprehensive and accurate data till date.