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Top scientists from Hong Kong, worldwide to join forces under new alliance backed by Aids-cure pioneer to fight future pandemics
- Renowned virologist Professor David Ho says University of Hong Kong and Beijing’s Tsinghua University have vowed support for team prepping against future pandemics
- ‘We don’t want to go through what we went through over the last 3½ years, so we want to be better prepared,’ he adds
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Top scientists from Hong Kong and worldwide are joining forces under a new alliance to tackle the next global pandemic, with a renowned virologist behind the project warning that more viruses might make the jump from animals to humans.
Columbia University’s Professor David Ho told the Post that the University of Hong Kong (HKU) and Beijing’s Tsinghua University had given their blessing to the plan to build a “Pandemic Research Alliance”.
The scholar, who is acclaimed for discovering the efficacy of a cocktail antiretroviral treatment for Aids, on Saturday said he was in talks with the University of Melbourne about joining the alliance.
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“We want to define what are the most important viral threats for pandemics, such as what we went through with coronaviruses, influenza viruses and what we call paramyxoviruses,” he said. “All of these could be easily transmitted from person to person via the respiratory route and therefore could spread very quickly.
“Once we define the most important threats, we could start to study them in greater detail to see if we could develop drugs, antibodies and vaccines, and get them ready. Some of them don’t have any of those, and so we could get them ready should one of those emerge as a virus-causing pandemic.”
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