Most pandemics in the past century were sparked by a pathogen jumping from animals to humans. This moment of zoonotic spillover is the focus of a multidisciplinary team of researchers led by Raina Plowright, the Rudolf J. and Katharine L. Steffen Professor in the Cornell College of Veterinary Medicine's Department of Public and Ecosystem Health.
Their research is one of three projects that make up Cornell's new Global Grand Challenge: The Future. The three-year challenge from Global Cornell aims to apply advances in our understanding of the social, digital and natural worlds to meet global communities' emerging needs.
"This is the kind of deep transdisciplinary work the world needs to solve 'wicked problems.' It's much easier to motivate governments to react to a pandemic that's already a problem," said Plowright. "If we're successful, we will create a paradigm shift toward prevention."
In recent research, Plowright and colleagues identified three major processes that may need to align for viruses - which are abundant in nature and often harmless - to cause problems.
First, wildlife habitats must develop an overlap with humans or bridging hosts such as domestic animals. This condition may occur when wild animals move because of deforestation or during extreme weather events, frequently the result of climate disruption.
The second factor is stress. The more stressed the host animals are physiologically, nutritionally and energetically, the more virus matter they shed. Plowright and her colleagues are developing a measure of this stress called allostatic load.
The third puzzle piece is human actions that bring people into direct contact with infected animals or their excretions. As individuals hunt, farm or butcher wild animals, for example, the virus may cross over into the human population.
"Once we understand the environmental, biological and behavioral drivers of spillover, the solutions often become obvious - and sometimes they are quite simple," Plowright said. One way to stem the spread of Nipah virus in Bangladesh, for example, is to cover open pots that are used to collect date palm sap. Bats are then less likely to contaminate the fluid that people later consume.
The Global Grand Challenge funding will help Plowright's team secure external support to establish a permanent center on campus for research on primary pandemic prevention. The center will coordinate research at a large scale and in different places, including Bangladesh, Australia, Ghana and Indonesia, Plowright said.
The project's initial focus is on bats - host to five of the nine major viruses the World Health Organization prioritizes for research due to their pandemic potential. Bats are also critical for the health of the environment through pollination, seed dispersal and insect consumption. Viral spillover is usually a signal of ecological degradation.
"We will be drawing on the deep expertise at Cornell to try to understand health at scale," said Plowright.
The team will deploy innovations in engineering to assess animal distributions by drones. Point-of-care tests currently used to study nutrition and stress in people will be adapted for use with animals. Researchers in political science and ecology are on board to help understand the political, economic and cultural contexts of behaviors that lead to viral exposures in cooperation with local communities.
A strong quantitative approach including artificial intelligence, finally, will integrate these large data sets and allow the team to project its understanding of risk to a wider geography, Plowright explained.
With support from Global Cornell, the project draws together research expertise across Cornell, including in CVM, engineering, agriculture and life sciences, human ecology, Weill Cornell Medicine and Cornell Tech, and launches wide-ranging collaborations with global partners.
"This work brings to fruition the idea of radical collaboration under which I was hired at Cornell," Plowright said.
Olivia M. Hall is a freelance writer for Global Cornell.
