Baric Transcribed Interview (Redacted) — page 94

DC.Scheduling@LexitasLegal.com be then to find sarbecoviruses. If we found the sarbecovirus with a furin cleavage site it would be dropped into a pseudovirus, and its biological characteristics evaluated by the Chinese. They would remove the furin cleavage site. They would introduce changes into the receptor binding domain and look in the context of those pseudotypes, which is the safe system, to ask questions about what the role of those mutations were in tropism and entry of viruses in receptor usage. Following gleaning that data, we would then use a zoonotic sarbecovirus as a receptacle to drop the spike genes of some of these viruses, and if we found one with full-on furin site we would put it in there and evaluate its biology. We would also remove that furin cleavage site and ask what the effect was on pathogenesis in replication. So it's a loss-of-function first. At the end of that there was speculation that if the furin cleavage site looked like it was having effect on replication of pathogenesis we would consider putting it into a gain-of-function scenario where we would drop it into a null backbone. So that's how the experiment was written. MS. SALAZAR: And who was going to be doing that work? DR. BARIC: That part would be done by me. MS. SALAZAR: Okay.