Latin American Center for Emerging Infectious Disease Research (LACER) - Abstract Our consortium brings together academics, Peruvian government officials, and NGOs with Peru- and US- based American researchers with established national and international collaborations (> 20 years), including strong regional connections in Ecuador and Brazil, to improve outbreak readiness and response through rational surveillance strategies for regionally relevant pathogens, across a gradient of geographical landscapes that reflect the country’s vast ecological diversity. Our primary focus will be arboviruses at high risk for adaptation to urban transmission cycles and geographic expansion due to climate change, zoonotic viral pathogens with documented or high potential for spillover transmission to humans, including arenaviruses, hantaviruses, and highly pathogenic influenza viruses with pandemic potential. Peru, with >60% of its territory located in tropical Amazon rainforest traversed by rivers connecting urban and rural human population centers, porous borders with Ecuador and Brazil, and extensive landscape modification through agriculture, logging, mining, and oil extraction, allows for the construction of a surveillance network transecting multiple ecotypes representing diverse and distinct viral emergence threats from zoonoses. We propose four Specific Aims: SA1. Define the geographic distribution of known and unknown viral pathogens at the interfaces between human populations and zoonotic transmission cycles. SA2. Expand regional viral surveillance strategies tailored to local needs and capacities and improve local diagnostic assay capabilities and response times. SA3. Advance characterization of human infection patterns, phylogeographic relationships, murine and vector infections, and transmission dynamics for arboviruses (flaviviruses, alphaviruses, and orthobunyaviruses). If detected, other viruses (coronaviruses, hantaviruses, arenaviruses, or undescribed pathogens) will also be characterized in accordance with biosafety capabilities and network collaborations. SA4. Define serological impact of previous viral infection on incursion with other viral species re-emerging and emerging in Latin America. Our consortium will use innovative approaches to improve surveillance for emerging pathogen threats. First, the consortium will develop pragmatic, locally adapted, diagnostic pipelines with built-in redundancy for pathogen discovery that expand our partner labs’ local capacity to identify regionally relevant pathogens. Second, we will apply an Implementation Science framework (INSPIRE) to restructure and transform government outbreak response and evaluate the feasibility and acceptance of NGS strategies in national surveillance and the unification of human and animal health agencies in outbreak response. Third, we will characterize viral pathogens encountered using phylogenetics, animal models and vector competence experiments. Finally, we aim to establish a needed BSL-3 facility in Peru to support laboratory characterization of zoonotic pathogens.
