Shi Zhengli

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Shi and other Institute scientists formed an expert group to research Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). In February 2020, researchers led by Shi Zhengli published an article in Nature titled, "A pneumonia outbreak associated with a new coronavirus of probable bat origin", finding that SARS-CoV-2 is in the same family as SARS, and that it has 96.2% genome overlap with the most closely related known coronavirus. In February 2020, her team published a paper in Cell Research showing that remdesivir and chloroquine inhibited the virus in vitro, and applied for a patent for the drug in China on behalf of the WIV. The granting of this patent by China raised concerns about intellectual property rights in an international context. Shi co-authored a paper labelling the virus as the first Disease X.

In February 2020, the South China Morning Post reported that Shi's decade-long work to build up one of the world's largest databases of bat-related viruses gave the scientific community a "head start" in understanding the virus. The SCMP also reported that Shi was the focus of personal attacks in Chinese social media who claimed the WIV was the source of the virus, leading Shi to post: "I swear with my life, [the virus] has nothing to do with the lab", and when asked by the SCMP to comment on the attacks, Shi responded: "My time must be spent on more important matters". In a March 2020 interview with Scientific American, where she was called China's "Bat Woman", Shi said "Bat-borne coronaviruses will cause more outbreaks", and "We must find them before they find us." According to an April 2020 opinion column by Josh Rogin in the Washington Post, U.S. officials sent to the WIV in 2018 had dispatched two diplomatic cables back to Washington which "warned about safety and management weaknesses at the WIV lab" and "also warn[ed] that the lab's work on bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic," noting that they had met with Shi Zhengli. Leading virologists have disputed the idea of SARS-CoV-2 leaking from a lab. Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance, which studies emerging infectious diseases, has noted estimates that 1–7 million people in Southeast Asia who live or work in proximity to bats are infected each year with bat coronaviruses. In an interview with Vox, Daszak comments, "There are probably half a dozen people that do work in those labs. So let's compare 1 million to 7 million people a year to half a dozen people; it's just not logical."

Nevertheless, Zhengli's and her team's work done to synthesise SARS-like coronaviruses (by building a "chimeric virus") to analyse whether they could be transmissible from bats to mammals, means they were altering parts of the virus to test whether it was transmissible to different species. The study acknowledges the incredible danger of the work they were conducting. “The potential to prepare for and mitigate future outbreaks must be weighed against the risk of creating more dangerous pathogens,” they wrote. “To examine the emergence potential (that is, the potential to infect humans) of circulating bat CoVs, we built a chimeric virus encoding a novel, zoonotic CoV spike protein — from the RsSHCO14-CoV sequence that was isolated from Chinese horseshoe bats — in the context of the SARS-CoV mouse-adapted backbone,” the study states. One of Dr Shi’s co-authors on that paper, Professor Ralph Baric from North Carolina University, said in an interview with Science Daily at the time: “This virus is highly pathogenic and treatments developed against the original SARS virus in 2002 and the ZMapp drugs used to fight ebola fail to neutralise and control this particular virus.” Their November 2015 study, done in conjunction with the University of North Carolina, concluded that the SARS-like virus could jump directly from bats to humans and there was no treatment that could help. (IN: The Daily Telegraph, "Coronavirus NSW: Dossier lays out case against China bat virus program", May 4, 2020)

In 2005, Shi Zhengli and colleagues found that bats are the natural reservoir of SARS-like coronaviruses. To determine the mechanism by which SARS may have spilled over into humans, Shi led a research team that studied binding of spike proteins of both natural and chimaeric SARS-like coronaviruses to ACE2 receptors in human, civet and horseshoe bat cells. In 2014, Shi Zhengli collaborated on additional gain-of-function experiments led by Ralph S. Baric of the University of North Carolina, which showed that two critical mutations that the MERS coronavirus possesses allow it to bind to the human ACE2 receptor, and that SARS had the potential to re-emerge from coronaviruses circulating in bat populations in the wild. In 2014, the US National Institutes of Health placed a moratorium on SARS, MERS, and influenza gain-of-function studies, due to concerns about the risks vs. benefits of such research, lifting this moratorium in 2017 after the creation of a new regulatory framework. Shi Zhengli and her colleague Cui Jie led a team that sampled thousands of horseshoe bats throughout China. In 2017, they published their findings, indicating that all the genetic components of the SARS coronavirus existed in a bat population in a cave in Yunnan province. According to their study, while no single bat harbored the exact strain of virus that caused the 2002-2004 SARS outbreak, genetic analysis showed that different strains often mix, suggesting that the human version likely emerged from a combination of the strains present in the bat population.

Shi Zhengli (simplified Chinese: 石正丽 ; traditional Chinese: 石正麗 ; born 26 May 1964) is a Chinese virologist who researches SARS-like coronaviruses of bat origin. Shi directs the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), a biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory located in Jiangxia District, Wuhan. In 2017, Shi and her colleague Cui Jie discovered that the SARS coronavirus likely originated in a population of bats in a remote region of the Yunnan, from which she took samples and brought them to Wuhan. Shi came to prominence in the popular press as "bat woman" during the COVID-19 pandemic for her work with bat coronaviruses. Shi is a member of the Virology Committee of the Chinese Society for Microbiology. She is an editor of the Board of Virologica Sinica, the Chinese Journal of Virology, and the Journal of Fishery Sciences of China.

Shi was born in May 1964 in Xixia County, Henan. She graduated from Wuhan University in 1987 with a bachelor's degree in hereditary biology. She received her master's degree from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in 1990 and her PhD from Montpellier 2 University in France in 2000.