Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, Harvard T. H Chan School of Public Health, Boston, United States; Department of Epidemiology, Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, United States; Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases, Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, United States
Wendy Barclay
Division of Infectious Disease, Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College, London, United Kingdom
Rahul Raman
Department of Biological Engineering, Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, United States
Charles J Russell
Department of Infectious Diseases, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Memphis, United States
Jessica A Belser
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, United States
Sarah Cobey
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Chicago, Chicago, United States
Peter M Kasson
Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, United States; Department of Molecular Physiology and Biological Physics, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, United States
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, United States; Fogarty International Center, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, United States
Sebastian Maurer-Stroh
Bioinformatics Institute, Agency for Science Technology and Research, Singapore, Singapore; National Public Health Laboratory, Communicable Diseases Division, Ministry of Health, Singapore, Singapore; School of Biological Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore
Steven Riley
MRC Centre for Outbreak Analysis and Modelling, School of Public Health, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology, School of Public Health, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom
Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, Institute for Cellular and Molecular Biology, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, United States; Department of Integrative Biology, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, United States
The threat of an influenza A virus pandemic stems from continual virus spillovers from reservoir species, a tiny fraction of which spark sustained transmission in humans. To date, no pandemic emergence of a new influenza strain has been preceded by detection of a closely related precursor in an animal or human. Nonetheless, influenza surveillance efforts are expanding, prompting a need for tools to assess the pandemic risk posed by a detected virus. The goal would be to use genetic sequence and/or biological assays of viral traits to identify those non-human influenza viruses with the greatest risk of evolving into pandemic threats, and/or to understand drivers of such evolution, to prioritize pandemic prevention or response measures. We describe such efforts, identify progress and ongoing challenges, and discuss three specific traits of influenza viruses (hemagglutinin receptor binding specificity, hemagglutinin pH of activation, and polymerase complex efficiency) that contribute to pandemic risk.
