MI2025 – CheeWah Tan

Title:
Bridging Species Barriers: Serological Evidence for Zoonotic Spillover Events

Abstract:
The impact of pandemics on global health, society, and economies is profound and far-reaching. The COVID-19 pandemic, in particular, has starkly illustrated the devastating consequences that can arise when existing outbreak response strategies are ineffective or inadequate. This experience highlights the urgent need for resilient and adaptive surveillance systems capable of monitoring emerging infectious diseases and bolstering collective pandemic preparedness at both regional and global levels. In this study, we report the development and implementation of a novel multi-family serological platform designed to rapidly assess functional neutralizing antibodies using a high-throughput multiplex format, delivering results within two hours. Leveraging this platform, we conducted a comprehensive serological analysis of population immunity against several high-risk zoonotic viruses, including SARS-like, MERS-like, and Nipah-like viruses. Our results indicate minimal or no pre-existing immunity within the population to these pathogens. Furthermore, we demonstrate that immunity acquired through prior infection or vaccination against SARS-CoV-2, Nipah virus, and MERS-CoV provides only limited cross-neutralizing protection against related viruses within these families. These findings raise two critical concerns: first, populations remain highly susceptible to future spillover events from animal reservoirs; second, traditional virus-specific vaccination strategies may be insufficient to address the ongoing threat of diverse and rapidly evolving pathogens. Our work underscores the necessity of developing broad-spectrum, next-generation vaccines and robust surveillance platforms to enhance pandemic preparedness and response. The serological platform described here has significant potential to inform public health policy, guide vaccine development, and enable early detection of emerging zoonotic threats.

Biography:
I received my Ph.D. from the University of Malaya, where I studied how a virus called enterovirus A71 interacts with the human body. After that, I continued my research as a postdoctoral fellow at Duke-NUS in Singapore, focusing on viruses that spread from bats to humans, and later on the COVID-19 virus. Throughout my career, I’ve co-authored over 90 scientific papers, including two first-author articles published in top journals like the New England Journal of Medicine and Nature Biotechnology. One of my most significant contributions was co-developing a test to detect COVID-19 antibodies, known as the surrogate virus neutralization test (sVNT). This test was commercialized as cPass™ in May 2020 and was approved for emergency use by the U.S. FDA later that year. It was also awarded a U.S. patent in 2021. In August 2023, I started my own research lab at the Infectious Diseases Translational Research Programme at the National University of Singapore (NUS). My team works on understanding infectious diseases that pose a threat to our region and developing treatments and vaccines to stop outbreaks before they turn into pandemics.