Using a laser microscope to compare victim samples sent by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to genetic material from about 1,000 different viruses imprinted on a glass slide, the University of California researcher found the telltale clues of the suspect virus appearing as illuminated dots on his computer screen.
DeRisi placed his computer's cursor over one lit dot and it read "bovine coronavirus." Another dot outputted "avian coronavirus." By the time he got to the turkey and human coronavirus dots, he knew he was dealing with something the world's scientists had never seen before.
If it had been a known virus -- say the human coronavirus, a cause of the common cold -- then only human coronavirus dots would have lit up.
"This suggests this is not a simple mutation of a human virus," said DeRisi.
Whatever this was, it was related closely enough to the other viruses to bond to their DNA but exotic enough to suggest that it was something entirely new that had crossed the species barrier.
DeRisi immediately e-mailed CDC researchers on March 23 confirming that a new coronavirus was probably causing SARS, which has killed at least 82 people and sickened hundreds, hurting business and travel as it spread from China, where it apparently originated.
The "virus chip" DeRisi and his colleagues created could come in handy as epidemiologists try to identify and contain emerging diseases -- including pathogens that bio terrorists could launch.
"It's amazingly simple and straightforward," DeRisi said. "There's nothing revolutionary about this concept except for the fact that we did it."
DeRisi built upon the already existing microarray -- or gene chip -- an 8-year-old invention that melds DNA onto glass using some of the same technology that makes computer chips. Microarrays allow biologists to analyze thousands of genes simultaneously instead of one at a time.
"Microarrays are pretty universal," said Henry Niman, a cancer researcher at Harvard Medical School, who uses chips with human genes in his own research and asked DeRisi for his results on the SARS finding. "Impressive," Niman concluded after analyzing the data.
With microarrays, scientists break small bits of DNA's double helix of each of the genes and attach one side to the chip, with its unique set of chemicals sticking up like tines on a comb. Researchers then pour solutions containing other broken strands of DNA to see which strands bond together.
Until now, most microarrays contained human genes. The ultimate goal of these tools is to improve human health, so this was a natural starting point. It also helped that the map to most human genes is freely available on the Internet, thanks to the Human Genome Project.
Thousands of other genomes of animals, plants and germs have also been charted in recent years. Except for a few notable exceptions, like the mouse genome, a corresponding boom in microarrays containing those nonhuman genes hasn't occurred.
About two years ago, DeRisi and two colleagues brainstormed about what tools would be vital to virus hunters. Instead of outfitting chips with human genes, the trio decided to put virus genes on their microarray instead.
Then, as now, there were no commercially available virus chips. So DeRisi and David Wang set up their own "home-brew operation," said DeRisi called it.
Wang, a 32-year-old postdoctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, set about the painstaking process of etching the genetic material of all mapped germs on to the first chip. DeRisi built the robot needed to pick up each sample to be tested and precisely dropped on the chip.
"A ton of software also needed to be written," DeRisi said, because the slide is best viewed on a computer screen after amplification under a laser microscope. The software also helps DeRisi interpret what he's seeing.
DeRisi also presented the idea to the intellectual property office at the University of California, San Francisco. He said the lawyers saw little commercial value in the invention and declined to pursue a patent.
In fact, the virus chip created scant attention in November when the researchers published word of it in the science journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
That all changed two weeks ago when CDC director Dr. Julie Gerberding told a packed news conference that the coronavirus was probably the cause of SARS. She said DeRisi's chip was "the absolute state-of-the-art probe for viral genes" and proved indispensable in the race to identify the cause of the pneumonia-like infectious disease.
The new coronavirus has not been officially declared the cause, but CDC researchers said they are "90 percent" sure it's culprit.
DeRisi has now become something of a rock star in science.
Media outlets clamor for interviews in his shiny new lab, opened in February at UCSF's new biotechnology center. He's deluged with telephone calls and e-mails from scientists around the world asking for advice and pitching potential collaborations, including projects that could be used to combat bio terrorism.
But for now, DeRisi is staying focused on his original research, which involves finding a malaria cure and identifying hundreds of unknown viruses that cause respiratory ailments that are more common than SARS.
"I really want to thoroughly catalogue the viral flora of our environment," DeRisi said.
Copyright 2003. Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
