On Monday, the term “Disease X” was trending on Twitter or X or whatever the social media platform is called these days. But it didn’t have anything to do with Twitter’s new name or what killed the platform’s previously used bird logo. No, the “X” after the word “Disease” was to emphasize that it’s not known which virus or other pathogen may be the next to jump from other animals to humans to become a threat and maybe even cause another pandemic.
This X marks one of the spots as to why the U.K. is establishing the Vaccine Development and Evaluation Centre (VDEC), situated at the U.K. Health and Security Agency (UKHSA) Porton Down campus in Wiltshire. As an August 7 announcement from the UKHSA indicated, “Working with national and international partners, VDEC’s skills and resources will enable the development of the vaccines we urgently need to save lives and mitigate the harm from vaccine preventable disease. This includes threats from known and new pathogens, including viruses of pandemic potential.” In other words, this is an attempt to stack the VDEC against future emerging pathogens that may try to wreak havoc amongst humanity.
Now, it’s not always clear exactly why any term begins trending on social media. Sometimes it’s because of bots. Other times it’s due to bots. And sometimes it’s actually due to what people are chatting about that day. In this case, folks may have seen that the UKHSA press release for the establishment of the VDEC included the phrase “Preparing to tackle ‘Disease X.’” And talk of that phrase may have led “Disease X” to trend, which could’ve been a bit disconcerting to some:
Now the term “Disease X” is not new. As I described for Forbes in an article entitled, “Disease X Is What May Become The Biggest Infectious Threat To Our World,” on March 10, 2018—you know roughly two years before the Covid-19 pandemic began—the World Health Organization (WHO) had added Disease X to its Blueprint list of priority diseases. This was the list of diseases for which the WHO determined accelerated research and development was urgently needed. And take a wild guess as to what disease were included on that list besides Disease X. Yes, the Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). After all, both of these coronaviruses already caused outbreaks during the prior two decades. So it would have made sense to have been more prepared for another coronavirus outbreak in say 2020.
The politicization of the origins of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has obscured the fact that viruses and other pathogens have been jumping from other animals to humans on a fairly regular basis. That happened with the original SARS and MERS-CoV outbreak. It happened with the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic. Scientific evidence to date still suggests that the SARS-CoV-2 originated in some other animal and then at some point made the leap to humans. So regardless of what various political leaders and TV/podcast personalities try to say, it will be important for our society to better prevent and prepare the next big jump.
VDEC will include over 2,800 square meters of laboratory space at Porton Down and be co-located with Defense Science and Technology Laboratory facilities. Efforts at the VDEC will consist of over 200 scientists working on around 100 different projects. The UKHSA announcement quoted Professor Dame Jenny Harries, the Chief Executive of UKHSA, as saying, “VDEC is a hugely exciting step-change for the UK’s vaccine research and development capabilities and a vital component of UKHSA’s critical work highlighted in our 3-year strategy, including preparing the UK against many of the biggest infectious disease threats.”
The announcement also provided examples of what the VDEC will work on in the coming years. One example is developing and scaling up tests of vaccine efficacy, laboratory assays that can determine how well antibodies and other immune responses generated by a vaccine can neutralize different viruses. A second example is development of a vaccine against Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever, which kills around 30% of people afflicted with the infection. This vaccine is already going through Phase I clinical trials. A third set of efforts will be developing and testing vaccines against influenza, both influenza viruses that can already infect humans and those that are for the birds only right now. Then there will be the X-rated efforts. This will include developing various immunological assays or tests that can quickly screen through different vaccine, drug, and other potential treatment candidates to establish which may be effective against a newly emerging pathogen when there is limited time to do so. It isn’t clear whether the scientists working on such Disease X will be able to refer to themselves as Professor X.
That won’t be the only way to solve for X, so to speak, to prepare for pathogens that are not currently known. For example, societies can develop better surveillance systems to track the activity of various viruses and pathogens. This can include monitoring how climate change is affecting the movement and habitat of different animals. They can also boost outbreak research and manufacturing capacity in general in many different ways. Moreover, developing vaccines and treatments against pathogens that are already known such as avian influenza can not only lead to other discovers, it can help prepare for the pathogens most likely to jump. Even if the known pathogens do change, it’s better to have something that works kind of well rather than nothing at all.
This way our society can better avoid what happened in 2020, namely political and business leaders getting caught with their collective pants down when the SARS-CoV-2 really started spreading. The response from many such leaders has been to find people to blame, make excuses, and even make up excuses in order to point fingers at something else, anything but themselves. It’s easy to blame your X on something. What’s more important and challenging is to prevent your X from coming around in the first place.
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