NIH Awards Vanderbilt Medical Center Research Team Grant to Study Viruses

The National Institutes of Health have awarded a Vanderbilt University Medical Center team with a $20 million research grant to work to “broadly characterize the role of viruses in human health and disease.”

The grant will also help “establish the Vanderbilt-coordinated Virus Characterization Center, or V2C2.” V2C2 will “figure as one of five research centers seeking to characterize the human virome — the collection of viruses in or on the human body — using diverse research cohorts across human lifespan, with participants studied repeatedly over a period of years. These centers will work in concert with research teams at other institutions having the allied aims of elucidating the interactions between the human host and the virome and developing tools, models and methods to interrogate and annotate the human virome.”

Two of the principal investigators for V2C2 laid out some of the hypotheses shaping the NIH program, including that “nonpathogenic viruses likely play important roles in human health and disease” and the notion that “viral persistence and integration into the human genome, even without symptoms, may significantly impact phenotypes (that is, observable traits) and health outcomes over time.”

V2C2 will “utilize two well-established cohorts to study the human virome: the Cameron County Hispanic Cohort (CCHC) and VUMC’s Childhood Allergy and the Neonatal Environment – Viruses study cohort (CANOE-VU).” Some of the research methods they will use include “novel integrated whole metagenomic/metatranscriptomic sequencing methods developed by Das’s group to assess DNA and RNA viruses, viral isolation and tropism studies (which reveal tissue preferences of viruses), and various methods to characterize host response.”