Khosta-2: Scientists warn Russian bat virus could infect humans and resist COVID vaccines

When SARS-CoV-2 - the virus behind COVID-19 - surfaced in China and quickly brought the entire world to a standstill, then-President Donald Trump liked to refer to it as "the Chinese virus".

Fast forward two and a half years, and US scientists are warning that a recently discovered virus harboured by Russian horseshoe bats is also capable of infecting humans and evading COVID-19 antibodies and vaccines.

The bat virus, named Khosta-2, is known as a sarbecovirus – the same sub-category of coronaviruses as SARS-CoV-2 – and it displays "troubling traits," according to a new study published in the journal PLoS Pathogens.

A team led by researchers at the Paul G. Allen School for Global Health at Washington State University (WSU) found that Khosta-2 can use its spike proteins to infect human cells very much like SARS-CoV-2 does.

"Our research further demonstrates that sarbecoviruses circulating in wildlife outside of Asia – even in places like western Russia where the Khosta-2 virus was found – also pose a threat to global health and ongoing vaccine campaigns against SARS-CoV-2," Michael Letko, a virologist at WSU and corresponding author of the study, said in a statement.

He said this discovery highlights the need to develop new vaccines that don’t only target known variants of SARS-CoV-2, such as Omicron, but that protect against all sarbecoviruses.

Among the hundreds of sarbecoviruses discovered in recent years, most have been found in Asian bats and are not capable of infecting human cells.

The Khosta-1 and Khosta-2 viruses were discovered in bats near Russia’s Sochi National Park in 2020, and it initially appeared they were not a threat to humans, according to the study’s authors.

"Genetically, these weird Russian viruses looked