Rationalizing the emergence of viral variants that drive epidemics/pandemics and an in-silico approach to identify possible viral mutations that can drive epidemics/pandemics and offering fresh hope for epidemic or pandemic prevention/preparedness

The therapeutic challenge in addressing Viruses remains the fact that Viral mutations are random and often hard for our therapeutic response to keep up with in terms of coming up with drugs or vaccines for the new viral variants. Therefore, it would be a boon to our anti-viral therapy if we could somehow anticipate the viral mutations that would arise and be prepared for them. Epidemics/Pandemics are also often driven by Viruses picking up mutations that cause them to become more infectious and virulent in Humans. Therefore, it would be a great boon if we could somehow anticipate the mutation associated with a virus that would cause them to virulent in humans and be prepared therapeutically to neutralize the strains associated with these mutations. With the data associated with the evolution of SARS CoV, it is possible now to understand how viral variants emerge according to Natural selection. Natural selection picks out the fittest variants in terms of their infectivity and virulence to be the most dominant. In the case of SARS CoV 2, the emergence of new dominant variants is associated with stabilization mutations on the Spike of SARS CoV 2 that have led to increased affinity for human ACE2 receptor and decreased affinity for neutralizing antibodies. An in-silico approach has been shown that enables us to anticipate these possible dominant variants and thereby guide therapy and response in the present pandemic or can be applied more generally to prevent future pandemics.