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New China H7N9 strain gives kick to mutant bird flu research

Doctors and nurses attend a training course for the treatment of the H7N9 virus at a hospital, where a H7N9 patient is being treated, in Han

By Kate Kelland, Health and Science Correspondent

ROTTERDAM, Netherlands (Reuters) - Dutch scientists hidden away in a top-security laboratory are seeking to create mutant flu viruses, dangerous work designed to prepare the world for a lethal pandemic by beating nature to it.



The experiments, designed to explore H7N9's potential to develop drug resistance and find which genetic modifications might enhance its ability to spread, could offer the know-how to halt a lethal flu pandemic, they say.

That could be with well-timed new vaccines or other therapies tuned to the pandemic strain's genes.

"We're bracing for what's going to happen next. If H7N9 becomes easily transmissible between humans, yes, the case fatality ratio may go down a little from where it is now, but we'd still be talking about millions of people dying," says Osterhaus, the head of a highly bio-secure laboratory in the Netherlands which will lead some of the H7N9 mutation work.

"This is a critical question - what does this virus really need to become transmissible? It is of extreme importance to being able to understand what's going on."

As things stand, 45 of the 136 people known to have contracted H7N9 bird flu in China and Taiwan have died - giving a case fatality rate of around 30 percent.

Fouchier, who has already done so-called "gain of function" experiments with another strain of bird flu, H5N1, says we need to get ahead of the game with H7N9 since its pandemic risk would rise "exponentially" if it gained in nature what he aims to give it in the lab - the ability to spread easily among people.




"The notion of 'gain of function' research on pathogens is very, very dangerous," he told Reuters.


But news last week that a 35-year-old from China's eastern Zhejiang province is in a critical condition in hospital with the virus reawakened fears that it could come back hard as temperatures drop and the flu season returns.


The studies aim to genetically modify the virus to see what it needs to give it more of a deadly pandemic kick. That could mean making it more virulent, more pathogenic and, crucially, more transmissible - capable of passing easily in droplets through the air from one mammal to another.

Naturally, it's not the sort of work that can be done just anywhere.

The Erasmus team has one of Europe's most secure laboratories - a so-called Enhanced BSL3, or Bio-Safety Level 3, lab - the highest level of biosecurity for academic research and a facility in which agents can be studied that cause "serious or lethal disease" but don't ordinarily spread between people and for which treatments or preventives exist.




"You need special keys to get in. You go though various changes of clothes and through all sorts of interlocked rooms," he explained during a Reuters visit to the campus.







"The easiest thing would be to back off and say 'OK, we won't touch this any more'. But that's not the right way to behave," said Osterhaus. "As a scientist you have a responsibility towards the public. And if we can prevent a pandemic from happening, that could save millions of lives."

(Editing by Mike Collett-White)