Project Defuse: Defusing the Threat of Bat-Borne Coronaviruses

March 24, 2018: “we will intensively sample bats at our field șites where we have identified high spillover risk SARSr-CoVs. We will sequence their spike proteins; reverse engineer them to conduct binding assays, and insert them into bat SARSr-CoV (WIV1, SHC014) backbones (these use bat-SARSr-CoV backbones, not SARS-CoV, and are exempt from dual-use and gain of function concerns) to infect humanized mice and assess capacity to cause SARS-like disease.”