May 5th marks the 1st anniversary of the day on which the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the end of the international public health emergency caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
After emerging at the end of 2019, and arriving in Europe at the beginning of 2020, the WHO estimates 7 million deaths associated with this disease. To mark the date, provide a perspective on the lessons learned and answer the question of “are we prepared for the next pandemic?”, three biochemists with a strong scientific background and who experienced the pandemic with different responsibilities and perspectives, talk about the topic in shared video.
Right from the first moment, Cláudio Soares reveals, pprofessor at the Institute of Chemical and Biological Technology António Xavier and Pro-Rector for Health at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa: “We brought together 11 teams and started doing research in the most diverse areas, and that was important in terms of research, but it was also important to keep people together in a common goal, which was, in fact, dealing with the pandemic using the eyes of scientists and no longer the eyes of despair, but the eyes of hope.”
Miguel Castanho, principal investigator at the Institute of Molecular Medicine (iMM) and Professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Lisbon, states that “When everyone went home and started to have a calmer life and complain about a confined life, I started to take on a very active and agitated role. We had a sudden and unprecedented transformation in our NOVIRUSES2BRAIN project as a result of a request from the European Commission to include SARS-CoV-2 within the package of viruses to be studied, to reorient it and be able to solve an immediate problem.” Furthermore, he adds, “I also played an active role at that time in being able to transmit useful information to people, through the media – especially because part of the population did not know what a virus was, how it spreads and how we can stop the spread. There was intense collaboration with the media and a great union between the communication sector and the science sector”.
Tiago Brandão Rodrigues, former Minister of Education, reinforces this issue of the new everydayness of many scientific concepts, noting that “with the ongoing pandemic we have viruses, we have variants, we have cases, we have signs, we have symptoms, we have tests, swabs and PCR, we have concepts such as transmission, prevention, R0, containment strategies and mitigation strategies, treatments and possible vaccination. Almost in this sequence, most of these concepts, which we already knew, became public knowledge”.
Other societies less well prepared than ours have had more negative consequences resulting from this pandemic. However, as this had a devastating effect, it was possible to control it, so the question arises “What are the lessons learned from this entire process?”
Cláudio Soares states that “learning is that we need to keep learning. Although we already have some knowledge of the past, for example of previous coronaviruses, which allowed us to act so quickly and emerge from the pandemic globally as a society using science – quickly arriving at the creation of the vaccine. And the information that we generate today outside of a pandemic, outside of an emergency, is fundamental to dealing with a future emergency.”
Miguel Castanhoin turn, highlights “What remains is the notion that potential dangers can, in fact, become real dangers”. Furthermore, it adds “I believe that another lesson that remains is that an alliance between rigorous communication and science is a precious asset. The victory [sobre a pandemia] It had to do not only with the knowledge that science generated, but also with communicating the advantages of new pharmacological tools to the general population. This combination of journalism and science was essential”
And in the future, are we prepared for the next pandemic?
To this question, Miguel Castanho responds that “hospitals, researchers, civil protection and the population must know what to do as soon as a new pandemic starts and, in addition, it is important that we have the necessary tools to deal with this event, in terms of prevention and treatment , and we are working towards that.” Furthermore, it explains that “at the Institute of Molecular Medicine and the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Lisbon, we are leading a project, NOVIRUSES2BRAIN, a European consortium, in which we are trying to develop a very broad-spectrum antiviral medicine – if there is a broad-spectrum antiviral, that serves for a great diversity of viruses that we know, it will probably also be able to be active against a virus that does not exist, but that will exist, because the viruses that will exist are evolutions of the viruses that exist at the moment”.
Already Cláudio Soares, states that “We are leading, together with IMM and other teams from Portugal, Spain and the rest of Europe, two projects whose objective is to prepare for new pandemics. It is a project funded by the La Caixa Foundation, called BioPlaTTAR, and a project funded by the Horizon Europe program, called EvaMobs. Our objective in these two projects is to create procedures that allow us to develop fast-acting and effective biopharmaceuticals against a new disease. In other words, combining everything from artificial intelligence techniques to clinical trials, we intend to create solutions so that, if a virus with pandemic potential appears, we can design, in a few weeks or months, better biopharmaceuticals than antibodies that can provide a pharmacological response to these infections.”
