Scientists making an ongoing effort to identify the microorganisms that make us sick have discovered a new virus potentially linked to unexplained respiratory infections.
Clinicians can typically use a patient’s symptoms to determine that a virus is the likely culprit in a respiratory infection. However, even with advanced testing, they still can’t blame a particular virus in roughly one-third of all such infections.
Scientists can’t yet prove that the new virus, known as the WU virus, is making patients sick. But senior author David Wang, Ph.D., assistant professor of molecular microbiology, is suspicious enough that he’s started follow-up studies.
“We’ve completed the first step required to link the WU virus to disease,” Wang said. “First, you have to detect the potential pathogen in someone who’s sick. Then you have to develop a way to grow the new microorganism in the laboratory. Finally, you have to show that you can make an animal model sick by exposing it to the microorganism.”
These steps represent the scientific “gold standard” for linking a microorganism to disease, Wang said, but as technology has made it possible for scientists to identify viruses before culturing them, the steps haven’t always been followed. For example, scientists have long accepted the hepatitis C virus as a cause of disease, but they only successfully grew it in the lab in the past year.
The research appeared in Public Library of Science Pathogens. It was supported in part by a grant from the Midwest Region-al Center of Excellence for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Disease Research, a multi-institutional research center anchored at the University.
For the study, collaborators at The Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne, Australia, provided samples from patients with respiratory infections. Despite an exhaustive battery of tests, Australian researchers had not been able to link the infections to any known pathogen.
Wang’s lab used a technique called high throughput DNA sequencing to study patients’ nasal secretions. The approach involves chopping up all genetic material from the secretions and rapidly and randomly reading the coding of that material.
In one patient, they found signs of a virus with limited similarity to polyoma viruses. The genetic material of the new virus is arranged in a similar fashion, and the virus’s five proteins have similarities to the proteins of other polyoma viruses.
After identifying the WU virus in the lungs of an Australian patient, researchers found it in the respiratory tract secretions of another 43 patients in Australia and St. Louis, suggesting that the virus may be geographically widespread. There are early suggestions that the virus may be a secondary infection more likely to invade when hosts already are dealing with another infectious agent.
Polyoma viruses previously have been named after the initials of the patient in whom they were first discovered. Enhanced patient privacy measures such as the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) no longer allow that, so the virus was named after the University.