C.J. Peters

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Position: Director, Center for Biodefense, University of Texas Medical Branch at
Galveston, TX

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Issue: Bioterrorism preparedness. We need to ramp up development of life-saving vaccines and drugs to protect ourselves from attacks with anthrax, smallpox, and other life-threatening bioweapons.

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Personal Point of Impact: Former chief, Special Pathogens Branch, National Center for Infectious Diseases, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

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Technology Review: What are the worst bioweapon threats? How prepared are we?
C.J. Peters:  Inhalation anthrax is one of the highest threats. Manufacturing stable material for a weapon is easier with anthrax than with other bioweapons. Plus, we have both the threat of antibiotic-sensitive anthrax, which is huge, and also the threat of antibiotic-resistant anthrax, which would be even worse. We know that antibiotic-resistant anthrax is easy to make. It's been done. It's in the literature. The Soviets claimed they made anthrax resistant to six different classes of antibiotics. Anthrax properly prepared and introduced into the ventilation system of a large building that might have thousands of inhabitants could kill virtually all of them. And you could repeat this building by building, or in a subway, or in a closed arena.

But other agents, if they're in a state-sponsored program, are also a huge threat. First of all, the viruses can be grown in animals, so you don't need a bunch of high tech cell cultures. We need to understand these agents better, particularly the agents that are natural disease problems. With hemorrhagic fevers like Ebola, you've got lethal agents for which there's very little, if any, therapy. Our preparedness on these fronts is still in the fantasy stage. We need to be moving forward: we have a couple of vaccines that could be developed further, and we have one antiviral drug that could be useful but has not been produced in large quantities or blessed by the FDA [Food and Drug Administration].

TR: What's wrong with our current efforts to protect ourselves against anthrax and other bioweapons? And what do we need to do?

Peters: We need to improve how we develop drugs to treat the effects of bioweapons. Our pharmaceutical industry and national health research systems aren't set up to do this. In the past, if we had a disease, the CDC went out and defined the threat. They would tell you, Here's polio, or, Here's measles, and so on. Then the NIAID [National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases] would develop the science to make a vaccine or other remedy possible. And then industry picked it up and manufactured it because it was profitable, and it was the thing to do. With bioweapons, the CDC doesn't know what the threat is any more than anybody else. We have the intelligence community telling us, and we're not used to that. The National Institutes of Health is sponsoring a lot of research, but industry is not going to pick these things up. It's just not going to. But let's don't beat up on the pharmaceutical industry. The industry was set up to make profits; it will spend a lot more effort making Viagra than thinking about anthrax. So we need a model where NIAID can contract directly or indirectly with industry or somehow find a way to motivate industry to pick these items up and actually develop them.