NIH/NIAID-Funded Hantavirus Gain-of-Function Mutations Created ‘Highly Infectious’ Chimera in 2018
May 16th, 2026Via: Jon Fleetwood:
A peer-reviewed study funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and published in 2019 says researchers intentionally mutated hantavirus glycoproteins and used serial passage to create what the study itself called “highly infectious” recombinant viral systems.
The revelation comes amid an alleged hantavirus outbreak linked to the cruise ship MV Hondius, which departed Argentina in April 2026.
The resurfaced gain-of-function work was funded under a multi-million-dollar NIH/NIAID grant AI132633 at Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
NIH RePORTER records show the project began in 2017 and remained active during the 2018 experiments that produced the infectivity-enhancing mutations described in the paper.
The study, published in mBio, states researchers started with wild-type Hantaan virus (HTNV) glycoproteins that were said to produce only poor rescue and replication in a recombinant vesicular stomatitis virus (rVSV) system.
One of the paper’s lead authors, Dr. Kartik Chandran, now also serves as the project lead of NIAID’s active $70 million PROVIDENT hantavirus pandemic-preparedness program, which had just completed unprecedented Andes hantavirus mapping and vaccine-platform engineering before the 2026 outbreak emerged.
