The Wuhan Institute of Virology's vital role in fighting COVID-19
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E-mail Science and Technology Daily, May 14, 2020
BSL-4 Laboratory's contribution and achievements
Science and Technology Daily: Could you please highlight the major breakthroughs and progress made by the BSL-4 Laboratory in terms of scientific and research advancement?
Yuan Zhiming: The BSL-4 Laboratory is actually a subsidiary of the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory. In addition, there are also two BSL-3 Labs, numerous BSL-2 Labs affiliated to the WIV, several ordinary labs, as well as facilities and supporting equipment for animal testing. The aforementioned labs and institutes constitute a cluster platform to safeguard biosafety.
After receiving then-unidentified samples of a pneumonia virus and successfully isolating the new coronavirus pathogen, the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory then applied for a number of accreditations that later enabled it to cultivate COVID-19 pathogenic cells and test them on infected rodents and non-primate animals. In addition, the lab's scientific research ethics supervisory committee and its animal testing management body have guaranteed the welfare of all animals used in trials by managing, observing and checking the whole process before providing their approval.
Therefore, the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory has made overall progress in several areas, including, purification of the proliferation of the COVID-19 virus, assessment into neutralizing antibody titers from the plasma of recovered patients, evaluation of the effects of disinfectants, assessment of the establishment of non-primate animals' experimental models and antibody medicines, development of inactivated vaccines, and trials on animal protection. So far, our achievements have encompassed the standardized techniques of virus proliferation and inactivation, the rollout of new disinfectants, the assessment of COVID-19's inactivation, the modeling of infections in rhesus monkeys and evaluations on candidate antiviral medicines and inactivated vaccines. The established model for animals has also provided a fundamental basis for evaluating other candidate antiviral medicines and vaccines.
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