Frozen Bat Tissue Samples May Hold the Key to Future Coronavirus Vaccines

TORONTO/LONDON, ON, February 10, 2021 – Analyzing frozen bat tissues and bat droppings could hold the answer to stopping the next coronavirus pandemic, according to researchers at Western University.

Researchers at Western are hunting for coronaviruses endemic to bats that have the potential for animal-to-human transmission. Rather than set off on a journey around the globe to look for bat coronaviruses, they have teamed up with biologists at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), which already holds thousands of frozen bat tissue samples from locales throughout the world.

In Western’s state-of-the-art Imaging Pathogens for Knowledge Translation (ImPaKT) Facility, the team hopes to use the different coronavirus types they identify in bats to develop a bank of ready-made vaccines that could be at the ready for the next pandemic. 

During the past 20 years, there have been three coronavirus epidemics in humans, including SARS in 2003, MERS, and now SARS-CoV-2, which has caused the global COVID-19 pandemic. Ryan Troyer, PhD, virologist at Western’s Schulich Medicine & Dentistry, says all of these viruses appear to be related to viruses found in bats, and that as humans are increasingly encroaching on wildlife habitats, there are more opportunities for animal-to-human virus transmission.

“When you put all of these things together, there is reasonable likelihood of animal-to-human transmission of another coronavirus in the future,” said Troyer. “So, our project is aimed at preparing for this eventuality by generating vaccines for the diverse coronaviruses that are present in nature, particularly focusing on those from bats.”

Western bat biologist Brock Fenton, PhD, is involved with collecting bat coronaviruses from sources such as bat feces, but he also knew that the ROM—just two hours away—has an outstanding frozen-tissue collection that includes samples of bats.  

Since the late 1980s, the ROM has been collecting and freezing mammal tissues in liquid nitrogen during fieldwork expeditions in order to study taxonomy and genomics. In the frozen tissue collections, the bat samples alone contain nearly 15,000 specimens representing 15 of 21 families, 120 of 220 genera, and 400 of 1,400 species from 30 countries. Along with traditional museum specimens, this helps to make the ROM’s entire bat collections one of the very best in the world.

"Built up over many years of ROM fieldwork researching bats, we have amassed a comprehensive collection of tissue samples from different species and countries, including bats from China,” said Burton Lim, PhD, ROM Assistant Curator of Mammalogy. “Our tissues, initially frozen at -196°C, are turning into a valuable resource for documenting viruses and helping us understand how to fight COVID-19 and new emerging diseases in the future."

Using both the frozen samples and bat droppings the Western University team is hunting for novel coronaviruses, which are then sequenced to determine those most likely to cause disease in humans. From those viruses, they will isolate their unique spike genes which form the backbone of a number of ready-made coronavirus vaccines, says Stephen Barr, PhD, a virologist at Schulich Medicine & Dentistry.
“Our goal is that when the next coronavirus emerges in the human population, we can do a quick screen of our bank to identify the specific vaccine that would have protective measures against the virus in the lab,” said Barr. 

Like the influenza vaccine, it could be distributed as soon as the virus begins circulating in the population. 
“Imagine if we had something like this when the outbreak first occurred in Wuhan in December 2019,” said Troyer. “A vaccine could have potentially been rapidly deployed to that area before it spread widely and maybe could have headed this off before it became a pandemic.”
 

Image Caption:  The ROM bat collections encompass specimens from localities around the globe, collected over many decades, and includes dried, ethanol preserved, and frozen tissue samples. Burton Lim, ROM Assistant Curator of Mammalogy, examines a bat specimen. Photo by Joshua See, © Royal Ontario Museum
 

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ROM MEDIA CONTACT 
Crystal Mackay, Media Relations Officer, Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry, Western University, 519.933.5944, crystal.mackay@schulich.uwo.ca 

David McKay, Communications, Royal Ontario Museum, davidm@rom.on.ca