Next week, world leaders will convene in Davos to debate ways to avert a future unknown “Disease X” that the World Health Organization says will kill 20 times more people than the recent coronavirus outbreak. The moniker may sound like something made up by Elon Musk, but the potential of Disease X has been on the WHO’s radar since it designated the fabled illness as a research priority in 2017. The WHO prioritizes Disease X research alongside other diseases such as COVID-19, the Ebola virus, SARS, MERS, Zika, and more.
Since the coronavirus epidemic, the WHO has issued many warnings that a next pandemic could be imminent. Given that researchers aren’t working with a proven pathogen – it’s simply expected that a truly awful one will arise at some time – efforts to avoid a resulting worldwide pandemic are speculative at best. Kate Kelland, Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations’ chief scientific writer and author of a book on Disease X, told the WEF’s Radio Davos podcast last year that reducing the impact of the as-yet-unknown pathogen simply requires extensive research into already-known virus families. Assuming, of course, that Disease X emerges from a known source or takes on a familiar form.
With a proper research framework and global knowledge base in place, a future Disease X pandemic could be eliminated in 100 days
Kelland gives COVID-19 as an example of how the fight against Disease X would ideally go down: Because that one was a coronavirus, something we know a fair amount about, fighting the infection was somewhat easier than it could have been. “Because scientists were working for decades or more on Sars vaccines and also on Mers vaccine, they found out some very key pieces of information about coronaviruses,” Kelland said. “If we do that kind of homework on every one of the 25 or so viral families that we already know have the potential to cause disease in humans … then we can gain a lot of knowledge ahead of time about something that doesn’t exist yet.”
There’s a real-world case to use an example: Monkeypox. “We already had a vaccine that worked [for Monkeypox] because it came from the same family as smallpox, camelpox, all sorts of other viruses, and they share common traits,” Kelland said. In essence, Kelland said, it’s all about doing the vaccinology legwork and research that puts the world in a good position “to produce something that will target a novel virus before that virus even emerges.” Armed with that knowledge of much of the world’s human-infecting pathogens, it’s just a matter of building a global repository of such knowledge, which Kelland said is part of CEPI’s mission. The hope is that, with a proper research framework and global knowledge base in place, a future Disease X pandemic could be eliminated in 100 days. “It is a vast amount of work, but it does have an endpoint and it is doable,” Kelland said.
That work will be discussed by the WEF’s Centre for Health and Healthcare on January 17, when it will meet with WHO and other health officials to examine Disease X preparations. We’ve asked the WEF for more information about the session. Along with the discussions at the WEF annual meeting, the WHO is developing a scientific framework for epidemic and pandemic research readiness. The WHO will host meetings this month and next to further strengthen its pathogen research initiatives. While staying ahead of Disease X is possible, “the less good news is that it will take a lot of international cooperation and resources,” Kelland has cautioned. That might be difficult, but it’s happened before – even amid a tense international climate like the one we have now. “The vast majority of the smallpox eradication work was done during the Cold War,” Kelland said. “The US and Russia were pointing missiles at each other, but they were also sharing vaccines.”