Profile: Understanding Public Health

Yale professor Jeff Townsend ’90 and colleagues are studying coronaviruses at the molecular level.

Michael Matros

In his Yale lab, and now from home, Dr. Jeff Townsend ’90 has been studying how the COVID-19 virus worked its way from animals into humans, and how that “zoonosis” process may be similar to that of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) in the early 2000s. What he and his colleagues want to learn is how that happened on the molecular level.

“Now, that doesn’t mean necessarily we know that those molecular changes are causative or even vital to the zoonosis,” Townsend says cautiously, “but it’s certainly the case that any molecular changes we can identify that happened around that period of time may be responsible for enabling the zoonosis (jump from animals to humans).”

As Yale’s Elihu Professor of Biostatistics and Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Townsend hopes his team’s research “can help us design therapeutics and vaccines that can prevent a COVID-19 infection.” Part of that is understanding the origins of the virus. “I think the scientific consensus is pretty strong that there is no evidence whatsoever that this came from a lab, and that everything that we’ve looked at is consistent with it coming from nature,” says Townsend. “Of course, we could never know if someone simply isolated the virus from the wild, and then during that isolation process got infected. That transmission could have just as well happened in a field where someone was exposed to the virus.”

The work of Townsend and his colleagues continues from their homes, in part because of a fortuitous exercise. Before the arrival of the pandemic, Townsend had just published a paper on how to set up virtual collaborations among multiple institutions to seamlessly continue the scientific process even if they aren’t in the same room.

“Essentially, all those tools I developed for that purpose were already implemented in my lab,” says Townsend, whose primary role is as a biostatistician. “I have to say I’m really, really pleased with all the people in my lab and how well they’ve maneuvered directly through this transition, and we’re still doing research at full pace.” Not all of Townsend’s work targets deadly pandemics. Coronaviruses, he points out, often cause a less dramatic disease.

“How many times in your life have you regretted having a common cold?” he asks. “It is no fun. It doesn’t kill you, right? But this is a major draw on us. It keeps people out of work, it’s miserable, and it’s often caused by coronaviruses and rhinoviruses. Townsend is trying to answer why we do not better understand the reasons humans don’t become immune to these things. It’s important, he notes, not just for the pandemics that may come about, but also just for our day-to-day lives. On that topic, Townsend laments the tendency of officials to reduce public-health funding between spikes in medical emergencies.

“We’re in a position now where we have to do science quickly,” he says, “and it will be expensive. In general, our expenses would be diminished if we did it in a more steady way and didn’t have to try understanding everything very, very quickly.”