With the aid of a five-year, $20 million research grant from the National Institutes of Health, a Vanderbilt University Medical Center research team is leading the charge to establish the Virus Characterization Center, or V2C2.
The V2C2 will include collaborating teams from UTHealth Houston, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The venture, as part of the Human Virome Program, will work to characterize the role of viruses in human health and disease.
“Human viruses are largely understudied, with most research historically focusing only on pathogenic viruses that cause obvious clinical disease, while the vast majority of viruses that reside in us without causing disease remain poorly understood,” said one of four principal investigators for the project, Suman Das, PhD, research associate professor of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases, who also serves as V2C2’s administrative lead.

“This is a great honor for us at the School of Public Health in Brownsville and the entire university,” said Susan Fisher-Hoch, MD, professor of epidemiology at UTHealth Houston School of Public Health in Brownsville, acting as one of four principal investigators. “The high level of phenotyping and the multiomic platform of our cohort will provide an exceptional ability to detect an effect by viruses on human health and disease. We also want to recognize the cohort participants from our community who generously worked with us to achieve this award.”
The other two lead investigators are cardiologist Ravi Shah, MD, professor of medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and epidemiologist Kari North, PhD, from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Researchers will investigate whether and how nonpathogenic viruses likely play important roles in human health and disease — similar to how the study of the human microbiome revealed important roles for bacteria.
Established Cohorts
V2C2 will utilize two well-established cohorts to study the human virome: the Cameron County Hispanic Cohort (CCHC) and VUMC’s Childhood Allergy and the Neonatal Environment – Viruses study cohort (CANOE-VU).
CCHC includes individuals ages 8 to 90 years from a low-income Hispanic/Latino population at the U.S.-Mexico border, with approximately 93% being Mexican American. Participating from this cohort will be approximately 1,750 individuals with bio samples spanning up to 20 years and 500 individuals who will provide prospective samples over approximately four years.
CANOE-VU, a study led by Tina Hartert, MD, MPH, professor of Medicine and Pediatrics, includes about 200 children followed from birth through age 5, recruited from VUMC obstetrical and nurse midwife practices. This birth cohort provides unique access to maternal-child samples across early development, including samples like placental tissue and breast milk.
“Together,” Das said, “these cohorts offer diversity across sex, sociodemographics, ancestry and geography, while providing both retrospective and prospective sampling approaches to facilitate rapid project deployment and cost-efficient analysis of the human virome.”
Impact of Viral Persistence on Our Genomes
Other areas of investigation are how viral persistence and integration into the human genome, even without symptoms, may significantly impact human phenotypes and health outcomes over time, and if there are important differences in host responses to the ambient virome that drive differences in human phenotypes.
A premise central to the Human Virome Program is that the virome interacts significantly not only with the host immune system but also with the human microbiome. Key research methods used by the V2C2 will include whole metagenomic sequencing to capture DNA viruses, whole metatranscriptomic sequencing to assess RNA viruses, viral isolation and tropism studies (revealing tissue preferences of viruses), and various methods to characterize host response, such as host genomic integration analysis, analysis of inflammatory state, and mucosal response studies.
The new center is supported by NIH grant U54-AG089326.
Sources: VUMC News, UTHealth