Talk to Wooster
Spring 2004
Making the World Saif
Microbiologist Linda Marsch Saif ’69 is tackling world health, one virus at a time
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Linda Saif ’69 |
Crown-shaped, round, cup-like. The coronavirus, rotavirus, and calcivirus might appear benign, but they cause havoc — from the common cold to severe stomach distress and dehydration to SARS. From her lab on the outskirts of Wooster, one microbiologist leads the global effort to understand and control these viral villains.
As a graduate student, Linda Marsch Saif ’69 developed a way to save the lives of piglets. Every winter a coronavirus infection killed hundreds of pigs worldwide. Saif uncovered a critical, natural link. Immunize the mother pig and mom’s milk passes on the antibodies to the sucklings. This finding explained a human phenomenon: Breastfed babies have a lower incidence of rotavirus diarrhea. The results led to the discovery of immunological relationships among other tissues and glands in animals and humans.
Most microbiologists focus on viruses or bacteria that primarily affect humans, ignoring those that sicken and kill livestock. Saif has concentrated on animal-related pathogens and their human versions for thirty-five years. She bridges the gap between basic and applied research, a rare thing in her field. She studies the properties of viruses in order to develop treatments and vaccines, for people as well as their four-legged counterparts.
"Nearly one million children die of rotavirus diarrhea annually, many in developing countries," Saif says, "but no human vaccines are available." And no vaccines or even specific treatments exist for the calcivirus that causes food-borne stomach and intestinal illnesses that can kill the young, old, sick, or malnourished.
Since 1979 Saif has worked in The Ohio State University’s Food Animal Health Research Program at the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center (OARDC) in Wooster. She has garnered more than $17 million in research grants and prestigious awards (see "Peer Review," below).
Among other efforts, Saif’s research group is trying to adapt the human calcivirus to grow in cell culture, in the hopes of immunizing livestock and people. Her group is also evaluating non-infectious, virus-like particles for their potential use in an oral or nasal vaccine. The National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Agriculture contribute funding to these efforts. Saif keeps in mind the possibilities that her research holds for humans. Those possibilities became starkly evident two years ago.
A global epidemic
Between November 2002 and July 2003, 916 people died after being infected by a coronavirus that was suspected to have been transmitted from animals to humans. The speed with which SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) spread led the World Health Organization to take the unusual step of issuing a global alert – the first in its history.
Soon after SARS surfaced, health experts called upon Saif. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization, and other organizations consulted with her almost weekly to try to understand and treat the illness. Because this was a new virus strain, researchers had to start from scratch in developing the antibodies that react to the SARS virus, ways to detect it, and the means of analyzing the data.
Knowledge about coronaviruses in animals – the results garnered by Saif and her group over the years – informs much of the work on SARS. The pneumonia associated with bovine coronavirus (BCoV, a disease of cattle) and the porcine respiratory coronavirus (a disease in pigs) resembles the pneumonia of some SARS patients, for example. Other people with SARS develop intestinal symptoms in addition to respiratory distress, similar to the shipping fever developed by some BCoV-infected cattle during or after their transport to feedlots. Saif notes that one common factor could be the stress and crowded conditions of travel, whether in cattle cars and feedlots or jet planes and airports.
Early in 2004 the World Health Organization invited Saif’s lab to join its International SARS Reference and Verification Laboratory Network. The network will monitor SARS and develop diagnostic tests. Saif’s expertise puts her at the center of this new global effort.
