Animal-to-human viruses a danger in future years, says AstraZeneca creator Catherine Green

AstraZeneca vaccine creator urges researchers to begin work now on vaccines for viral diseases that may cross over from animals to humans in future years.

Oxford Astra Zeneca scientist Professor Catherine Green is taking part in the 2022 Vogue Codes Summit at Carriageworks. Picture: John Cairns

One of the creators of the AstraZeneca vaccine, British scientist Catherine Green, has urged researchers to begin creating vaccines now for viral diseases that may cross over from animals to humans in future years.

Associate Professor Green, the Head of the Clinical BioManufacturing Facility at Oxford University, said future pandemics were likely as humans lived in closer proximity to animals.

She said that scientists needed to immediately start working on vaccines against the viruses that were most likely to emerge as future pandemic risks.

Dr Green will be speaking as part of the Vogue Codes Summit held in Sydney on Saturday, which aims to connect digital innovators, thought leaders, and industry pioneers who are influencing the technology landscape globally.

“I think as the human environment impacts more on the natural world, we will see people living in closer proximity to animals,” Professor Green said. “So we will have these crossover events where viruses that used to exist in animal populations are able to move into human populations, whether that’s because of intensive farming, people living in proximity to their animals, or whether it’s habitat removal and destruction. So we will start to see viruses move from animals into humans more.”

Vogue Codes, proudly presented by Optus, is making its return in 2022 to connect you with digital innovators, thought leaders, and industry pioneers who are influencing the technology landscape globally. For full details, visit www.vogue.com.au/vogue-codes/

Professor Green said there were about 25 families of viruses that infect humans, and within those 20 families, about a million viruses that have the potential to cross over from animals into humans.

“So we need a really strong underpinning of basic science here, we need to understand quite a lot about those families of virus, because that will be the knowledge from which you will be able to rapidly apply in thinking about what a vaccine would need to be in an emergency situation,” Professor Green said.

“And we probably need to have done some work on making vaccines against known family members in all those families so that we know what to do in a future pandemic. if we study and test vaccines against these known virus families, we’re kind of already halfway there to being able to make a vaccine.”

One of the reasons the Oxford University team was able to produce a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2 so quickly was because they had already been working on a vaccine against another coronavirus, Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome.

Professor Green said one of the other critical aspects of preparing for future pandemics was creating antiviral treatments, and beefing up reporting and communication networks throughout the globe so that new human viruses that may emerge are able to be quickly contained. This did not happen with Covid-19 as China initially covered up the spread of the disease.

“If a virus crosses from an animal into humans, we need to try to get containment at the source,” Professor Green said. “We have seen what happens if a virus gets out of control and is able to spread globally. It’s much, much better to put significant resources into containment when the virus is first identified, because we could have avoided all of the problems we have if we had contained SARS-CoV-2 at its source in early 2020 or late 2019.

“So that takes global effort, scientific communication, and political will, and I hope we learn all of those things, but I’m not sure how easy that is to do.”