In the wake of an important new study on Zika that came out yesterday, I’d like to propose a puzzler: Name three things that Zika and Ebola have in common.
- Both previously low-profile viruses?
- Both originally confined to other species or remote locales?
- Both quickly mushroomed and threatened to turn into worldwide public health crises?
Yes, yes, and yes. But there’s another underlying similarity that consumes my thoughts, and it’s not about the viruses’ background, structure, or clinical presentation.
Here’s a hint: both of these viruses led to me to receive similar emails, more than a year apart. Both were from researchers at the forefront of these emerging areas of great concern and inquiry. And both emails went something like this, “We’re about to publish a really important study, and your organization’s funding was critical to undertaking the work. I want to thank you.”
My organization, Research to Prevent Blindness, was not the sole funder for either of these research studies. But our funding was particularly valuable in both of these high-impact, and frankly, scary, areas of inquiry. Why?
The Zika study, published online yesterday in prestigious journal Cell Reports, describes a mouse model developed by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis that shows that the Zika virus is detectable in tears. The study also tells us that Zika can lead to cell death in the eyes. This is consistent with clinical reports that pinpoint red, infected eyes as one of the distinguishing characteristics of adult humans with Zika.
While we don’t yet know what these findings mean in terms of transmission (virus in tears does not necessarily mean the virus can spread through tears, although there are questions of how the virus has spread between humans), it’s a critical step in developing a model for the development and testing of treatments for Zika infections in the eye, where it really counts—in humans. Such findings are sure to have an important impact on the course of Zika diagnosis and treatment.
In the Ebola example, infectious disease specialist Dr. Ian Crozier went to West Africa as a medical responder when the virus first presented in humans. He contracted the virus himself, and thankfully was successfully treated. But months later, his eye suddenly changed color and he developed sight-threatening inflammation. The virus was found living in his eye.
Dr. Steven Yeh, a researcher in the Emory Eye Center, treated Dr. Crozier with an experimental antiviral and corticosteroids. Dr. Crozier’s sight gradually recovered, and Dr. Yeh and his colleagues went on to develop a treatment protocol that was rolled out in Africa, helping to save the sight of thousands of Ebola sufferers and preventing recurrence from an unlikely virus safe harbor—the eye. The researchers published their findings in The New England Journal of Medicine.
So back to the funding from my organization —why did it matter so much? In both of these cases, the money available to the researchers at Washington University and Emory University was unrestricted and flexible—which many scientists will tell you is the holy grail of funding. It means they can apply the funds to different types of research (not just a specific project that has to go through time consuming grant approvals and reviews), they can nimbly pursue promising research leads, and it means they have the flexibility to immediately undertake particularly timely collaborations and studies in the face of a critical research opportunity or even a health crisis.
This kind of flexibility in eye research is particularly important because the eye is a window to the health of the whole organism as we again dramatically have found with both Zika and Ebola.
I urge all of you to show your support for organizations that provide unrestricted funding to excellent researchers and excellent research institutions. If we’ve learned anything through these public health crises (one still very much unfolding), it’s that nature is adaptable (or, in the case of viruses, virulent). It’s time that we arm our scientists and researchers with the resources they need to adapt also.
Brian F. Hofland, Ph.D., is the president of Research to Prevent Blindness, the leading voluntary health organization supporting eye research directed at the prevention, treatment, or eradication of all diseases that threaten vision. Learn more at www.rpbusa.org.
