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Access and benefit-sharing following the synthesis of horsepox virus

Nature Biotechnology volume 38, pages 537–539 (2020)Cite this article

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To the editor — In January 2018, PLOS ONE published the chemical synthesis of horsepox virus (HPXV) by a group of privately funded Canadian researchers. The authors state that “[s]ince HPXV may be extinct and the only specimen of HPXV that has been identified is unavailable for investigation, we explored whether HPXV could be obtained by large-scale gene synthesis.”1 The DNA sequence of the HPXV genome was published2 in 2006 and is publicly available in the US National Institutes of Health GenBank database. The Canadian researchers used the HPXV genome sequence as the digital template to ‘rematerialize’ the virus using DNA fragments ordered from a commercial provider in Germany. Viruses from the genus Orthopox have particular genetic structures (like terminal hairpin loops) that make them difficult to both sequence and reverse engineer, but the Canadian group overcame such technical difficulties using a helper virus, recreating a “faithful copy” of the HPXV template1.

The de novo synthesis of a virus so closely related to the now eradicated smallpox virus was said to have crossed “an important Rubicon in the field of biosecurity,” bringing “the world one step closer to the re-emergence of smallpox as a threat to global health security.”3 In a purely technical sense, the research was simply an extension of previous synthetic biology projects that have seen the synthesis of other microorganisms like poliovirus4, the 1918 pandemic strain of H1N1 influenza virus5 and the bacterium Mycoplasma genitalium6. Scientists are starting to overcome the technical barriers associated with the de novo synthesis of simple lifeforms. The synthesis of HPXV appears to be the first time that a whole microorganism has been engineered specifically because the physical sample was not readily available to researchers as a result of regulatory constraints.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Law Futures Centre, Griffith Law School, Griffith University, Nathan, Queensland, Australia

    Michelle F. Rourke

  2. CSIRO, Synthetic Biology Future Science Platform, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

    Michelle F. Rourke

  3. Center for Global Health Science and Security, Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington, USA

    Alexandra Phelan

  4. O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA

    Alexandra Phelan

  5. Environmental Futures Research Institute, Griffith Law School, Griffith University, Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia

    Charles Lawson

Authors
  1. Michelle F. Rourke
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  2. Alexandra Phelan
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  3. Charles Lawson
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Correspondence to Michelle F. Rourke.

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Rourke, M.F., Phelan, A. & Lawson, C. Access and benefit-sharing following the synthesis of horsepox virus. Nat Biotechnol 38, 537–539 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-020-0518-z

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