University of Minnesota steps up search for disease-spreading threats

The University of Minnesota is stepping up efforts to identify biological threats that could trigger an epidemic, launching an institute to track disease-spreading infectious pathogens at the genetic level and monitor wastewater statewide.

The U’s Institute on Infectious Diseases (UMIID) will be officially unveiled later this month, but its surveillance efforts are underway. Michael Gale, the institute’s director, was recruited last year away from the University of Washington, where he was involved in identifying the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and developing vaccines or drugs that work against it.

The institute received bad news at its outset with the loss of federal funding grants last month that will limit its global partnerships to identify emerging infections. But Gale said it is still positioned to provide a level of disease surveillance that is diminishing elsewhere in the U.S. because of federal cuts to scientific and public health research by the Trump administration.

“UMIID is needed more than ever,” he said.

A key function will be tracking viruses and other pathogens for genetic mutations that indicate they could cause more infections or severe diseases. The state public health lab used a similar approach to track genetic variations during the COVID pandemic, identifying the delta and omicron coronavirus viral strains that fueled severe illness waves in 2021 and 2022.

Gale said a first step will be monitoring changes in arboviruses such as West Nile Virus that are spread by ticks and mosquitoes commonly found in Minnesota. West Nile hasn’t been as much of a scourge as was feared in Minnesota after it was discovered in 2002 and caused 150 confirmed illnesses in 2003.

Only 22 West Nile cases were reported in the state last year. However, Gale said, “there is evidence of a new genetic drift” that could result in an increase in infections and illnesses again. The Powassan virus, spread primarily by deer ticks, also is a concern for Minnesota that needs closer monitoring, he said. Modeling studies will examine how mosquito and tickborne diseases spread in humans.

The institute also will increase surveillance in Minnesota for changes in the H5N1 strain of bird flu that could present more threats to human health. H5N1 animal outbreaks have disrupted poultry and beef production in Minnesota, and caused 70 confirmed illnesses in the U.S. among workers who had contact with infected livestock. The threat to human health could increase if the virus mutates into a form that spreads from person to person. Such a strain could emerge from someone infected with seasonal influenza and H5N1 at the same time.

“We were all waiting for an influenza virus reassortment and what we got was COVID. It was very unexpected,” Gale said. “So bird flu was huge on our radar. We still think that’s the next big possibility” for a global public health event.

The Trump administration in early June cut millions in federal funding for 10 universities including the U that combined five years ago to make up the Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases (CREID) and search for viruses or other pathogens that could jump from animals to humans.

Instead of getting an extension on federal support, Gale received an email from the National Institutes of Health on June 5 stating the network’s research “has been deemed unsafe for Americans and not a good use of taxpayer funding. Current agency priorities do not support this work.”

The letter did not elaborate, but the network appears to have been stained by the Trump administration’s concerns over the origins of COVID-19 and theories that the coronavirus was created through gain-of-function research at a lab in Wuhan, China. Gale stressed that the network and the U’s institute aren’t engaged in such research, which is banned in the U.S. and involves genetic manipulation of organisms to enhance their capabilities.

Investments by the U and private donors will sustain the new institute and allow it to add equipment and scientists.

“We had wanted to be bigger ... so we could attack an emergence of a pathogen with a bigger stick, but unfortunately we can’t,” Gale said.

The institute is the second addition on campus putting the U at odds with Trump administration priorities on science and public health. The U’s Michael Osterholm, an infectious disease expert, used private funding this spring to launch the Vaccine Integrity Project, which is designed to counter misinformation about vaccines — even from Trump’s health administration — with scientific evidence about how they work.

The institute also will build on wastewater surveillance, which Minnesota was among the first to develop during the pandemic as a way to monitor rising or falling COVID levels across the state. A study last month in the Journal of Infectious Diseases validated the approach, showing elevated coronavirus levels in wastewater provided a week or two of advance notice during the pandemic before COVID illness levels increased in the Twin Cities.

A U lab conducted much of the analysis of wastewater samples submitted from treatment plants across the state. The next step is to pass more of that COVID surveillance work to the Minnesota Department of Heath while the university checks wastewater for signs of influenza, measles, RSV or other concerning pathogens.

Initial signs of influenza emerged in the U’s wastewater analysis 12 weeks before the traditional start of influenza season last year, said Mark Osborn, an associate professor in the U’s Center for Genome Engineering who has led the U’s wastewater surveillance program. Results will be publicly reported once research has validated their accuracy.

U researchers also are studying ways to make testing faster, and in portable devices that could hasten discovery of infectious diseases in individual communities.

Osborn said the next step goes beyond “spotlight” checks for individual pathogens, and instead identifying genetic signatures of all materials found in wastewater samples. The results would then be checked against databases of the genetic signatures of known pathogens to identify those presenting a public health threat.

The goal is “creating a tripwire so that the top 10, 20 or 50 pathogens, should they be detected, trigger an alarm,” he said. “Then the next step is, we use one of the more targeted [tests] to confirm that result.”

The institute’s other research priorities include studying why some pathogens become resistant to antibiotics, antivirals or other treatments and understanding the role of the body’s innate immune system in response to infection.