The COVID-19 pandemic isn’t over. In fact, it shows signs of lingering for, well, a long time.
But even as politicians and health authorities struggle with how, if at all, to keep addressing the current pandemic, scientists are already anticipating the next one. They’re scouring the planet for animal viruses that, like SARS-CoV-2, could leap to the human population and cause serious disease on a global scale.
They just found one. And it’s nasty.
In 2020, a team of Russian scientists collected a few horseshoe bats in Sochi National Park in southern Russia. The Russians identified, in those bats, a new virus they called Khosta-2. Behaviorally, the virus seemed to have a lot in common with SARS-CoV-2. Two years later, a separate team—including scientists from Washington State University and Tulane University—tested Khosta-2 along with another newly-discovered Russian bat virus, hoping to determine whether they’re capable of infecting people. And, if so, whether our antibodies stand any chance of stopping them.
The initial results, which the team described in a new peer-reviewed study that appeared last week in the science journal PLOS Pathogens, are worrying. The second bat virus didn’t seem all that infectious. But Khosta-2, on the other hand, took a liking to human cells.
“We tested how well the spike proteins from these bat viruses infect human cells under different conditions,” the scientists wrote. “We found that the spike from the virus Khosta-2 could infect [the] cells, similar to human pathogens using the same entry mechanisms.”
Equally troubling, Khosta-2 proved “resistant to neutralization by serum from individuals who had been vaccinated for SARS-CoV-2.” In other words, our bodies’ defenses against COVID-19 might not protect us from a hypothetical disease caused by Khosta-2.
