WIM no. 17 Spring 2020

מכון ויצמן למדע 8–9 Video: What is a vaccine? S P R I N G 2 0 2 0 So, notes Prof. Arnon, it isn’t enough to generate a vaccine—it has to be delivered to everyone at risk in order to be truly effective. For COVID-19, that’s the whole world. By the time that happens, the current outbreak may have run its course. It’s also not clear whether, if a vaccine is developed for COVID-19, coronaviruses will have a seasonal fluctuation and die out like influenza, which is what happens to the flu, thanks to the herd immunity caused by the seasonal flu vaccine, as well as the arrival of warmer temperatures to which the virus is ill suited. Coronaviruses are a common type of virus, and they come in a variety of strains. Most of these strains produce the mildest of cold symptoms in the infected individual. From time to time—and with frustrating unpredictability—a virulent variety appears, such as the SARS coronavirus (SARS-CoV) strain of 2003, MERS-CoV in 2012 (both of which petered out by summer) and most recently, SARS-CoV-2. If this latest one sticks around, or if it decides to keep reappearing like influenza, having a vaccine will be crucial. While a universal coronavirus vaccine may not help us win the current outbreak, says Prof. Arnon, it would help us mount the best defense for the future. Coronavirus by the numbers A measured approach to understanding—and defeating—the COVID-19 pandemic The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is a harsh reminder that, whether the virus is spreading within a single human host or in a wave of infection spanning continents, many of the most critical answers we seek about this unprecedented crisis are expressed in numbers. Quantitative questions include: How long does it take a single infected person to infect a million others? How long does the coronavirus survive on surfaces? How effective is social distancing, and how many lives can this policy potentially save? More than a decade ago, during his postdoc at Harvard Medical School, Prof. Ron Milo created an online, shareable resource for “bio-numbers”—values culled from the scientific literature that relate to biological processes as they occur on all scales, from the levels of atoms and molecules, to the levels of organisms and ecosystems. Over the years, Prof. Milo’s initiative grew into a massive database called BioNumbers that allows scientists around the world to search bio-based data to find answers to their questions, and to identify interesting questions that had never occurred to them before. Now, he and his colleagues are applying the same approach to the fight against the coronavirus. Those colleagues include Yinon Bar-On, a PhD student in the Milo lab in the Weizmann Institute’s Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences, Prof. Rob Phillips from the California Institute of Technology, and Dr. Avi Flamholz of the University of California at Berkeley. In a recent publication in eLife , the researchers used existing peer-reviewed literature to create something that could well be called “Corona-by-the- numbers”—a comprehensive collection of the key biological properties currently known about the coronavirus that can be measured in numerical terms. They will be curating these numbers, and updating them as new data emerge from laboratories, clinical centers, and public health authorities worldwide. A range of scientific insights could potentially emerge from the use of this data. For example, the carefully curated values may spark new ideas about how the immune system could be stimulated to fight the virus. They may reveal how the coronavirus is similar to, or different from, other viruses against which preventative strategies already exist. Measurements of viral particle concentration could aid in the design of diagnostic kits for asymptomatic patients. And by offering measurements of factors that influence the speed at which the disease spreads, the data Prof. Milo and his colleagues compile may lead to new strategies for protecting populations worldwide. “Knowledge of the numbers related to the coronavirus can give us a ‘sixth sense’ that allows us recognize what we can’t see or feel—thereby serving as a basis for thoughtful, quantitative insights that may lead to important discoveries,” Prof. Milo says. Weizmann MAGAZINE Weizmann MAGAZIN