End ‘panic and forget’ cycle of basic research, says virologist

Early career researchers diligently working away in a laboratory might sometimes feel as though they are in a vacuum with the real-world applications of their work hard to fathom.

But the experience of one US academic demonstrates how seemingly abstract research can go on to become a valuable piece of the global scientific jigsaw in a major crisis.

Ten years ago, Meagan Deming, who now works in the Center for Vaccine Development and Global Health at the University of Maryland, was a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill researching coronaviruses.

She was first author on a 2011 paper, published in the Journal of Virology, that looked at the effect on mice of a potential vaccine for severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars), the forerunner to Covid-19 that caused a deadly outbreak in Asia in the early 2000s.

For years the paper laid relatively dormant in terms of citations, but a study identified this year how it was among more than a dozen articles that had seen their citation impact gain “sudden traction” due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The study, by Milad Haghani and Pegah Varamini, two academics based in Sydney, showed that the articles – often called “sleeping beauty” papers due to the way they suddenly “awaken” in terms of citations – scored hundreds of citations in a matter of months in 2020.

Dr Deming said the reason her paper had gained attention was because it had, along with other studies, helped to clarify that targeting virus spike proteins might be the best way to design a vaccine for Covid. This was because they had helped in 2011 to demonstrate that using vaccines based on a whole inactivated virus might lead to adverse health effects in older people.    

She said that although she knew citations for older coronavirus research “were going up dramatically” when the pandemic hit, she initially “didn’t realise that it would include mine and I didn’t realise how much it would inform the vaccine development”.

Although her career has moved more towards clinical medicine and research – during the pandemic she has been involved in treating patients and trialling vaccines and treatments – she “suddenly became the local coronavirus expert on campus” when Covid took hold last year. 

Dr Deming also said her experience had underlined the vital nature of basic research and how it had to be properly funded because the world could not foresee exactly when it might need it.

“It is an incredibly strong argument for basic research. It is why we were able to turn a vaccine around and get it out in under a year [which is] an incredible accomplishment,” she said.

As a result, she said she hoped the world would stop the cycle of “panic and forget” when it came to basic research on diseases that lead to funding drying up when a particular outbreak was contained.

She said before the pandemic she knew of coronavirologists who were “holding on by the skin of their teeth” but now there were “incredible resources and they are the ones putting out some amazing science”.

“You can’t just go through these cycles of panic and forget; you have to remember that basic research is what supports your response in times of crisis.”

simon.baker@timeshighereducation.com