Health News - Working together against a common enemy

"It’s a bitter irony that, for those in the global health community contending with viral outbreaks, many of the barriers to mounting an effective response are man-made. Geopolitical and cultural divides that separate us as people can inhibit research efforts and humanitarian aid. Viruses, meanwhile, pay little heed to such arbitrary boundaries; they prey instead on what we all have in common — our shared, human biology. In scientific research, man-made barriers range from the personal (professional expediency and a legacy of siloing and secrecy in science) to the practical (the bureaucracy and logistics related to patient data privacy, biological sample collection, and storage). All of these factors came into play as the Ebola outbreak erupted last year in West Africa, threatening to delay both scientific discovery and delivery of medical care. But with colleagues in harm’s way and in the face of a growing public health threat, researchers in Broad Institute Member Pardis Sabeti’s lab were determined to overcome such obstacles. Already on the ground studying Lassa fever in Sierra Leone’s Kenema Government Hospital, in collaboration with Tulane University, the group was positioned to analyze the first blood samples when suspected cases of Ebola appeared in the country. The team used genome sequencing to confirm that the virus was present in the samples, then began the work of using that data to trace the strain’s roots and monitor its evolution. At every step — as more and more samples came their way for sequencing — Sabeti’s group made their Ebola data available to the broader research community online. The availability of the data attracted the likes of phylogeneticists Andrew Rambaut in the UK, Trevor Bedford in the US, and Eddie Holmes in Australia whose teams immediately set to work analyzing the data, adding to the manpower dedicated to tracking the virus’s development ..."