Scottish scientists break ground in ‘future pandemic preparedness’

AI-powered software has revealed “never-seen-before” viral mechanisms, turbo-charging future pandemic preparedness, researchers claim.

Scientists from Glasgow University have used artificial intelligence to uncover entry mechanisms which explain how viruses enter and replicate across our bodies.

It is claimed that the findings hold “immediate fundamental insights” and could “pave the way for vaccine development”.

Dr Joe Grove, lecturer at the MRC-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research, said: “By discovering more about the entry proteins on the outside of viruses, as we’ve done, we can better understand the fundamentals of viral biology, which in turn can guide development of drugs or vaccines.”

In collaboration with the University of Sydney, the team used AI protein structure prediction to examine hundreds of species in the Flaviviridae, a large family of viruses that causes diseases such as Dengue and Hepatitis C.

The AI technology, developed by Google Deep Mind and Meta, allowed researchers to find and classify the entry proteins of all the viruses tested – something which traditional methods cannot do.

This study is the first to demonstrate that Hepatitis C – suffered by 39,000 in Scotland – has a completely novel entry mechanism, unlike other viruses.

And it is hoped this new information will “help lead to the development of a new vaccine”, Grove added.  

It is also understood that the findings could help tackle current viral threats such as Mpox, which the World Health Organisation declared a public health emergency of international concern las month.

“Going forward we want to use this technology to scale up our research to thousands of viruses. By doing this we can build foundational knowledge to inform our responses to existing and new viral diseases,” Grove added.

The study has been published in the medical journal Nature.