建立埃博拉病毒生物样本库有助非洲科学

ipsvirus

西非拟建埃博拉病毒生物样本库。图片来源：Daniel Berehulak

随着西非埃博拉疫情的逐渐好转，为了更好地利用公共卫生部门收集的数十万患者样本，一项计划正在酝酿。8月6日~7日，世界卫生组织（WHO）在塞拉利昂首都弗里敦召开会议，讨论建造生物样本库，储存取自确诊和疑似埃博拉患者的血液、精子、尿液和母乳样本以及取自死亡患者的标本等，共计约10万份样本。

西非和西方国家健康机构持有的这些样本将对理解目前埃博拉危机的演化、应对未来再次暴发和发展公共卫生研究能力十分有价值。“这些资源将十分宝贵。”WHO理事会顾问Cathy Roth说。但该计划面临的一个困难是，没有这样一个生物样本库应如何运作的蓝图，因此没有国家决定加入其中。

尽管此次收集的样本数量远超之前暴发时收集的数量，但它们仍是有限资源。目前的讨论需要决定哪些样本能被使用以及应强调何种研究。“我们希望明确研究重点，因为这些样本是会枯竭的资源。”无国界医生组织（MSF）埃博拉创新项目经理Ethan Guillen说。Guillen还表示，受感染国家需要一个体系，以便“它们的科学家在发生了什么和从中能学到什么经验方面有发言权”。

数千份样本已经由那些参与埃博拉患者研究的外国机构运离非洲。但美国疾控中心（CDC）、欧洲移动实验室项目和法国巴斯德研究所等数个机构对该生物样本库持谨慎的支持态度。CDC在接受《自然》杂志采访时表示：“CDC是支持建设埃博拉病毒生物样本库的，这将为全世界的科研机构提供使用样本的机会。”CDC表示，自己目前持有西非和美国的样本，但并未透露具体数量。去年12月，它从塞拉利昂将7000份样本运到美国。

Guillen提到，他希望相关问题能够得到解决。“我们需要更好的研究工具。”他说，“希望我们能尽快就绪。”

来源：中国科学报

dangerdan

有科普了一下

ipsvirus

cao1976 发表于 2015-8-13 10:44
有个小疑问，埃博拉病毒为什么会在这些国家流行，在美洲和亚洲怎么没有？是他们的公卫工作不到位？还是病毒 ...

不是说埃博拉来源于当地的野生动物吗，而且不像SARS和流感一样能通过空气传播，所以传播性没那么恐怖

cao1976

有个小疑问，埃博拉病毒为什么会在这些国家流行，在美洲和亚洲怎么没有？是他们的公卫工作不到位？还是病毒本身的特点？

ipsvirus

Proposed Ebola biobank would strengthen African science
International public-health officials discuss how to maximize research benefits of a widely dispersed collection.

Erika Check Hayden

As West Africa’s Ebola outbreak winds down, an effort is under way to make the best use of the tens of thousands of patient samples collected by public-health agencies fighting the epidemic. On 6–7 August, the World Health Organization (WHO) convened a meeting in Freetown, Sierra Leone, to discuss how to establish a biobank for up to 100,000 samples of blood, semen, urine and breast milk from confirmed and suspected Ebola patients, as well as swabs taken from the bodies of people who died from the virus. Held by health agencies in both West Africa and the West, the samples could be valuable in understanding how the current Ebola crisis evolved, preparing for future outbreaks and developing public-health research capacity in a region that depends on outside experts.

“There are many, many ways that this resource could be precious,” says Cathy Roth, an adviser to the WHO directorate in Geneva, Switzerland, which arranged the meeting as part of a series of international discussions about the creation of an Ebola biobank. One of the difficulties is that there is no blueprint for how such a biobank would work, so countries have not yet committed to joining it.

One proposal has been to link existing collections in an online biobank with a reference laboratory in Africa that would hold certain samples — for instance, collections taken from notable groups of patients, or from people who were followed especially closely throughout the course of their disease. Such a facility would be a first for the region; there is currently no high-containment lab in the Ebola zone that is suitable for studies of live, highly dangerous viruses.

Although the samples vastly outnumber those collected in previous outbreaks, they are still a finite resource. Ongoing discussions will need to grapple with who decides what the samples can be used for and what kinds of research should be emphasized.

“We want to have defined research priorities, because these samples do represent an exhaustible resource,” says Ethan Guillen, project manager of the Ebola initiative at Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in Geneva, which is advocating for the biobanking project.

Assigning control over these decisions to the three countries where the majority of Ebola cases occurred — Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone — is a major priority for MSF. Historically, much research on viral haemorrhagic fevers such as Ebola has been done by scientists in developed countries using samples taken from developing countries. Guillen sees that as part of the reason why, 40 years after Ebola was first documented in Africa, there is not enough public-health capacity in some countries to contain the disease or effective tools to treat or prevent it.

Guillen says that affected countries need a system in which “their scientists have a say in what happens and can learn from the experiences, so there doesn’t have to be such a reliance on outside actors”.

Already, thousands of samples have been shipped out of Africa by foreign government agencies that stepped in to test patients for Ebola during the outbreak. Several, including the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, the European Mobile Laboratory Project and the Pasteur Institute in Paris have expressed cautious support for the biobanking idea.

“CDC is supportive of the concept of Ebola biobanks for samples, particularly in the affected countries, which would offer organizations around the world access to samples from the largest Ebola outbreak in history,” the agency told Nature.

Only the European mobile lab provided detailed information on how many samples it has — about 3,000 in a high-containment lab in Hamburg, Germany, says virologist Stephan Günther of the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg, which implements the lab project. Günther says that the European mobile lab is acting as custodian of the samples, which are still owned by the countries in which they were collected. The project has signed agreements with Sierra Leone and Guinea that guarantee access for researchers from those countries, he adds.

Public Health Canada says that it has not yet shipped samples out of West Africa but would not reveal where it is holding them, citing “biosafety and biosecurity concerns”.

The CDC says that it is keeping samples both in West Africa and the United States but would not state how many it holds. In December, it shipped 7,000 from Sierra Leone to the United States (seeNature http://doi.org/6jm; 2014). However, the agency has come under fire recently for major lapses in biosecurity (see Nature http://doi.org/6jn; 2015), and raised this among a number of potential hurdles to creating a biobank.

Guillen says that he is hopeful that these issues can be worked through. “We need better research tools,” he says. “Hopefully we can move quickly to get these tools in place.”

Nature 524, 146–147 (13 August 2015) doi:10.1038/524146a
http://www.nature.com/news/proposed-ebola-biobank-would-strengthen-african-science-1.18158