Ilaria Capua

Ilaria Capua (born 21 April 1966 in Rome) is an Italian virologist and former politician, best known for her research on influenza viruses, particularly avian influenza, and her efforts promoting open access to genetic information on emerging viruses as part of pre-pandemic preparedness efforts.

Capua is currently a professor at the Institute of Food and Agricultural Science (IFAS), and has a joint appointment with the College of Veterinary Medicine and the College of Public Health and Health Professions at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida, U.S. She was recruited to direct and lead the UF One Health Center of Excellence in research and training.

A veterinarian by training, Capua has mainly worked in the field of veterinary virology and zoonotic viral infections. At the peak of the H5N1 panzootic, Capua decided to post the sequence of the first H5N1 African virus on a publicly accessible website (GenBank) rather than contribute the data to a password-protected database maintained in Los Alamos and accessible only to a small group of researchers. One observer described Capua as "belonging to a longstanding tradition of scientists rebelling against established ideas and the upper echelon among their colleagues" but also advocating a new outlook in which scientific cooperation is "enacted directly between scientists and not mediated by institutions."

Biography

Training Born in Rome in 1966, Ilaria Capua graduated with honors in veterinary medicine from the University of Perugia in 1989. In 1991, she completed a post-graduate specialization course in animal health and hygiene at the University of Pisa.

Scientific activities Prior to joining the Italian Parliament, Capua served as director of the Department of Comparative Biomedical Sciences for the Istituto Zooprofilattico Sperimentale delle Venezie (IZSVe), Legnaro in Padua. This DIVA strategy has been invented and developed already years earlier for the eradication of herpesviruses. The strategy involved inoculating poultry with an inactivated vaccine derived from an antigenically related H7N3 virus—coupled with a diagnostic test directed to identifying antibodies to the neuraminidase antigen, that revealed whether avian-flu antibodies present in a subject animal were caused by the H7N3 vaccine or by the field H7N1 virus. Today, DIVA is among the strategies recommended by the European Union to combat avian influenza on a global scale.

During the outbreak of panzootic H5N1 influenza, which could be transmitted from birds to people, Capua's lab in Padua received a sample of the viral strain recently introduced in Nigeria for typing and characterization. The journal Science reported on Capua's effort, stating that she had "renewed the debate about how to balance global health against scientists' needs to publish and countries’ demands for secrecy."

Capua's initiative was covered by the international press including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and the Washington Post. The English-language scientific press continued to cover the debate, as did mainstream European press.

Recently, Capua has been coordinator of the workgroup on Avian Influenza of EPIZONE scientific excellence network, which has been set up to improve the control of the epizootic diseases in Europe. It consists of more than 300 researchers from 16 international research centres – two of them outside Europe. Epizone is a new European Commission project under the sixth research framework programme (FP6), priority 5 (food quality and safety), and it has a budget of €14 million over five years.

Today, the WHO, FAO, and OIE promote and support better sharing mechanisms, data transparency, and an interdisciplinary approach to improve preparedness for pandemic events.

Capua has authored and co-authored more than 200 peer-reviewed publications, mainly on viral diseases of animals and diseases that can be transmitted from animals to people.

Political activities In January 2013, Capua was asked to run for a seat on the Italian Parliament by Mario Monti, the Italian Prime Minister at the time, who sought to add scientists and academics to Parliament. Capua accepted, and in February 2013 was elected a member of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, one of the two divisions of the Italian Parliament. Capua served for over two years as vice president of the Commission for Science, Culture, and Education of the Chamber of Deputies.

Ilaria Capua resigned as a member of the Italian Parliament on September 28, 2016. Her resignation speech was published in the first page of Corriere della Sera.

Legal proceedings

In 2014, while she was a parliamentarian, the Italian weekly magazine l'Espresso revealed that Capua had been the subject of a ten-year criminal investigation by Italian police. The magazine's cover article reported a conspiracy between scientists and pharmaceutical companies to increase the sales of vaccines by deliberately spreading viruses.

In July 2016, Capua was cleared of all charges by the judge for preliminary investigation of the Court of Verona, because "there was no case to answer." The judge's decision mentioned that "there was evidence of fabrication of evidence against her."

Works and publications

Books Ilaria Capua, Franco Mutinelli, A Color Atlas and Text on Avian Influenza, Reno, Papi Editore, 2001. Ilaria Capua, Idee per diventare veterinario. Prevenire l'influenza aviaria e altre malattie degli animali (Ideas for veterinarians-to-be. Prevention of avian flu and other veterinary diseases), Bologna, Zanichelli, 2007. Ilaria Capua, Dennis Alexander (Eds), Avian Influenza and Newcastle Disease: A Field and Laboratory Manual, Milan, Springer Healthcare Italia S.r.l., 2009. Ilaria Capua, I virus non aspettano, Avventure, disavventure e riflessioni di una scienziata globetrotter (Viruses do not wait. Adventures, misadventures and reflections of a globetrotting scientist), Venezia, Marsilio, 2012. Ilaria Capua, l'Abbecedario di Montecitorio: La Camera dei Deputati in un surreale dizionario dalla A alla Z (The Abecedarium of Montecitorio: The Chamber of Deputies in a surreal dictionary from A to Z), Padua, In Edibus, 2016, Ilaria Capua, Io trafficante di virus (I, the virus trafficker), Rizzoli, 2017. Ilaria Capua, Circular Health: Empowering the One Health Revolution, EGEA Spa - Bocconi University Press, 2020

Publications Ilaria Capua's publications in peer-reviewed journals can be found on PubMed.

Honors and awards 2005 - Houghton Trust Award (WVPA) 2006 - ProMED-mail Anniversary Award for Excellence in Outbreak Reporting on the Internet 2008 - Named a "Revolutionary Mind" by the magazine Seed 2009 - "Great Hippocrates Award" from the Italian National Union of Scientific Medical Information 2011 - Penn Vet World Leadership in Animal Health Award from the University of Pennsylvania 2012 - Grand Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic 2012 - Gordon Memorial Medal Nottingham 2013 - International Prize "Guido Lenghi and Flaviano Magrassi 'from' Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei for biological or clinical virology 2014 - Excellence Award 2014 awarded by ESCMID, European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases 2017 - International literary prize for Science and Arts, Fondazione PescarAbruzzo 2017 - Schofield Medal University of Guelph