College of Veterinary Medicine is responding to COVID-19 crisis

Navigating the current COVID-19 pandemic demands ingenuity, compassion, empathy and spirit. The Ohio State University College of Veterinary Medicine has come together to collaborate with partners across The Ohio State University community, from the College of Medicine to the College of Engineering to the College of Pharmacy, to combine expertise and create new ways of thinking and to deliver solutions, at an unprecedented pace. 

The College of Veterinary Medicine’s faculty, staff and students have always been focused on creating a healthy and sustainable world for animals and people. Our One Health approach is even more relevant during this rapidly changing crisis. These are a few highlights of how the College of Veterinary Medicine is addressing the challenges and living the college’s ambition to Be The Model™ comprehensive college of veterinary medicine in the world. 

Infectious Disease Institute addresses COVID-19 pandemic from multiple perspectives 

Michael Oglesbee, DVM, PhD, is a virology and comparative pathology professor at The Ohio State University College of Veterinary Medicine and has built a research career on viral infectious disease, emphasizing comparative modeling. In 2017, he led the effort to establish Ohio State’s Infectious Diseases Institute (IDI) and is the Inaugural Director. The institute is built upon the One Health concept and has been critical in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The IDI encompasses six interdisciplinary research networks that comprise 248 faculty members from 13 colleges at Ohio State and the Abigail Wexner Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital. Of important note, in addition to Dr. Oglesbee’s leadership role as the director of the IDI, five of the 16 program directors across the six program areas are faculty in the College of Veterinary Medicine.

COVID-19 illustrates the challenge of emerging infectious disease, and the IDI’s multi-disciplined, collaborative approach to combating disease has delivered critical information to Ohio’s public health experts and policymakers, such as the Ohio Department of Health (ODH) and the Ohio Hospital Association. These partnerships have provided guidance to Ohio officials and residents throughout each stage of the pandemic in the areas of predictive modeling, treatment strategies, vaccine development and preparation for response to future outbreaks from other viruses. 

In the early stages of Ohio’s COVID-19 response, the IDI’s Ecology, Epidemiology, and Population Health team spearheaded efforts to use predictive modeling to forecast outbreaks, and those models helped the state “flatten the curve.” Ongoing predictive modeling efforts come from the Comprehensive Monitoring Team, which draws members from IDI, ODH, and Ohio State entities such as the College of Public Health, the Sustainability Institute, and the Translational Data Analytics Institute.  The group is forecasting the progression of COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations along with implementing strategies for contact tracing and containing new outbreaks. It has informed the reopening of Ohio State’s campuses and research facilities this fall.

The IDI has played a critical role in the routine testing of students on campus for SARS-CoV-2 infection through the Applied Microbiology Services Laboratory, this being a key step to block spread through contact tracing, quarantine and isolation. The test is based on nucleic acid amplification in saliva samples. Graduate and professional degree student testing began the week of October 26 and expanded to include undergraduate students the week of November 9. The goal is to process a total of 20,000 tests per week by January. This approach provides a fast test turnaround, essential for contact tracing, and is provided at a significantly reduced cost compared to contract laboratories.

Collectively, IDI faculty research efforts span a basic understanding of how coronaviruses jump between species to cause disease and the development of novel approaches to detection, treatment, and vaccine development. The approach is fundamentally interdisciplinary and comparative, drawing upon what we know about coronaviruses in animals as well as humans. 

New lab test clarifies the potential protective effects of COVID-19 antibodies  

Shan-Lu Liu, MD, PhD, professor, Department of Veterinary Biosciences, program director, Viruses and Emerging Pathogens Program, Infectious Diseases Institute, alongside a team of colleagues, has developed a new lab testing procedure/assay for the detection of “neutralizing” antibodies against SARS-CoV-2– those that protect by blocking infection of cells.  These assays also provide results more quickly than other assays in use.

Liu and his colleagues developed what is called a “pseudotype” virus-neutralizing antibody assay, in which a human immunodeficiency virus vector and core are coated with the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein to detect antibodies against the coronavirus. Co-first authors Cong Zeng, a postdoctoral researcher, and Jack Evans, a student in the molecular, cellular and developmental biology graduate program, completed the majority of the work to develop the assay. 

With the new analytical tool in hand, scientists in the College of Veterinary Medicine collaborated with Gerard Lozanski, MD, professor, Clinical Pathology Branch, and others in the College of Medicine to analyze 221 patient blood samples to validate the effectiveness of the assay and verify that the detection test could be scaled up for widespread screening. Results of these analyses revealed that the more severe the disease, the higher the antibody levels produced and that there is a wide spectrum of different antibody levels after infection. 

Liu is the senior author of a new journal article published in JCI Insight describing the assay. He says that although many assays currently in use can detect antibodies, they don’t reveal if there are neutralizing antibodies. Some antibodies might be protective, some might not, and some might even enhance infection. 

The effectiveness, sensitivity and specificity of the assay were important factors in Ohio State’s successful application for a $10 million National Cancer Institute grant awarded last month for studies of the long-term impact of COVID-19 on first responders, health care workers and the general population.

Two of the co-authors on the JCI Insight paper will be co-principal investigators of the first-responders study: Eugene Oltz, PhD, professor and chair, Microbial Infection and Immunity, College of Medicine, and Linda Saif, MS, PhD, DACVM, distinguished university professor, College of Veterinary Medicine and the Food Animal Health Research Program in the College of Food, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.

This assay will be used to conduct a serological study of first responders in Columbus, among other uses. Additional applications could include screening for protective qualities in lab-manufactured monoclonal antibodies designed for therapeutic purposes and neutralizing antibody production in vaccine candidates.

Patent applications have been filed covering the assay and its use in a variety of applications. Inventors named on the applications are Shan-Lu Liu MD, PhD, Cong Zeng, PhD, Jack Evans, and co-authors Panke Qu and Yi Min Zheng, PhD from Dr. Shan-Lu Liu’s lab at the Ohio State’s College of Veterinary Medicine. 

Additional co-authors are Rebecca Pearson, Richard Robinson, Ph.D., Luanne Hall-Stoodley, Ph.D., Jacob Yount, Ph.D., Sonal Pannu, MBBS, and Rama Mallampalli, MD, from the Ohio State’s College of Medicine. 

The research was supported by a fund provided by an anonymous donor to Ohio State’s College of Veterinary Medicine, grants from the National Institutes of Health, a Glenn Barber Fellowship and an Ohio State COVID-19 Seed Grant.

Environmental Surveillance for COVID-19

Vanessa L. Hale, DVM, PhD, assistant professor, Veterinary Preventive Medicine, associate director, OSU Center of Microbiome Science, co-director, Microbial Communities Thematic Program within the Infectious Diseases Institute, coordinated the efforts of many investigators across various departments and colleges at Ohio State to characterize the SARS-CoV-2 virus in environments outside of humans. 

Alongside Seth Faith, PhD, strategic alliance officer, Infectious Disease Institute, and with the support of the Infectious Disease Institute and the Center of Microbiome Science, their efforts came together as eSCOUT: Environmental Surveillance for COVID-19 in Ohio: Understanding Transmission. While much effort is currently and necessarily invested in understanding SARS-CoV-2 transmission and infection dynamics in humans, the potential role of viral persistence and spread in non-human sources and environmental reservoirs remains largely unknown. 

eSCOUT is involved in testing wastewater and stormwater (urban runoff) around Ohio for SARS-CoV-2. Identifying the virus in wastewater can help determine how much and what strain of virus is circulating within a population. Viral spikes in wastewater also allow early detection of outbreaks. 

eSCOUT is also testing pets, shelter animals, agricultural animals, and wildlife. Identifying SARS-CoV-2 in animals can help answer questions about what kinds of animals can be infected – symptomatically or asymptomatically, and if these animals can transmit the virus to other animals or people. Environmental and animal surveillance will provide critical insights on current circulating SARS-CoV-2 strains as well as emerging mutations and spread, and this monitoring is vital to help predict and prevent future outbreaks and spillover events.

Investigators involved in this project include: Andy Bowman, MS, DVM, PhD DACVPM, Dubraska Diaz-Campos, DVM, PhD, Mark Flint, BVSc, BSc(Hons), MApplSc, MPhil, PhD, Dipl. ACAW, Jaylene Flint, PhD, Alexis McLaine, DVM, MPH, Anastasia Vlasova, DVM, PhD, Jenessa Winston, DVM, PhD, DACVIM, Tom Wittum, MS, PhD, and Page Yaxley, DVM, DACVECC, from the Ohio State’s College of Veterinary Medicine; Linda Saif, MS, PhD, DACVM, Qiuhong Wang, BM, MS, PhD, Anastasia Vlasova, DVM, PhD, Risa Pesapane, MS, PhD, and Scott Kenney, PhD, from the Ohio State’s College of Veterinary Medicine and the Ohio State’s College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences; Jiyoung Lee, PhD and Mark Weir, PhD, from the Ohio State’s College of Public Health and the Ohio State’s College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Science ; Matthew Sullivan, PhD, from the Ohio State’s College of Arts and Sciences and College of Engineering, Laura Kubatko, PhD, from the Ohio State’s College of Arts and Sciences; Ryan Winston, PhD, from the Ohio State’s College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences and the Ohio State’s College of Engineering; Michael Goodson, PhD, and Blake Stamps, PhD from the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and Dusty Lombardi and Stormy Gibson from the Ohio Wildlife Center. 

Viral transport media for COVID-19 testing  

In mid-March, Amit Sharma, PhD, assistant professor, Department of Veterinary Biosciences and Microbial Infection and Immunity, was approached by Jacob Yount, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Microbial Infection and Immunity, to help devise a simple recipe for viral transport media – a critical component of COVID-19 test kits, which were in extremely short supply. 

Drs. Sharma and Yount worked together and researched the components of viral transport media that were used to stabilize the virus collected via nasal swabs. Their goal was to make this viral transport media simple to prepare by creating a recipe using chemicals and salt solutions readily available in their labs. 

The Ohio State University received FDA approval for the viral transport media to help expand COVID-19 testing across Ohio and the supply chain department distributed these to testing sites and emergency departments for use. The lab has continued to produce viral transport media for healthcare teams around the state, resulting in the ability to test thousands of people for COVID-19 who otherwise would have had no other testing option.