The word “virus” tends to conjure bad associations — influenza, COVID-19, measles and tissue-strewn bedspreads. It’s true that plenty of viruses are detrimental to human health, but they’re a small part of the complete viral picture.
An estimated 380 trillion individual viruses inhabit the human body, yet we go about our lives generally oblivious to them. “Most of the viruses we carry — the gut is where most of them sit — coexist with us and aren’t linked to disease,” said Michael Snyder, PhD, professor of genetics at Stanford Medicine. The majority of viruses we harbor are actually bacteriophages — that is, they infect bacteria.
Snyder, who holds the Stanford W. Ascherman, MD, FACS Professorship in Genetics, is the project leader of Stanford Medicine’s newly established Viromes Across Space(s) and Time Center, which will catalog human-dwelling viruses and shed light on what they’re up to. He is also a principal investigator at the center along with Ami Bhatt, MD, PhD, professor of medicine and of genetics at Stanford Medicine, and Christopher Mason, PhD, professor of physiology and biophysics at Weill Cornell Medicine.
The VAST Center is funded with a five-year, $20 million grant from the Human Virome Program, whose purpose, according the National Institutes of Health, is to “describe the ‘healthy’ virome — the collection of viruses that normally reside inside the human body without evidence of disease — and to improve our understanding of the role it plays in shaping human health.”
The program awarded $171 million to 16 institutions, of which five — including Stanford — will focus on describing people’s viromes at multiple life stages. Researchers will classify viruses by type and where they’re found on the body. Blood and urine samples, as well as other biological samples, will be taken at intervals from healthy volunteers.
Researchers at the VAST Center are collecting longitudinal data on the viromes of about 200 volunteers from diverse lifestyles and backgrounds. For example, some are racial minorities, some have been in space, some have spent two months in Antarctica and some have undergone an exercise intervention. The investigators are taking tissue and body-fluid samples from the volunteers every three to six months, Snyder said. Samples of viral particles in the air around them also will be analyzed.
“What’s special about our project is we’ll be able to match what’s going on with the virome as a function of people’s lifestyles and things that happen to them,” Snyder said. “For example, what happens when you change your fiber intake? Or when you get a vaccination? Or get infected with, say, a common cold?”
