Thanks. So they optimized the spike protein of SARS so it could bind better to ACE2, and they used money from Germany and the European Union to do this.
German Research Association Grant
This is a big player: Annual budget 3.3 billion euros to fund 31,000 research projects, offices in Washington and Beijing. https://www.research-in-germany.org/en/research-funding/funding-organisations/deutsche-forschungsgemeinschaft-(dfg).html
Basically.
293T cells were used as packaging cell lines for preparing the pseudotyped virus. Huh7 was a gift from Dr. Stanley M. Lemon (The University of Texas Medical Branch, USA). Human cell lines (Bel7402, T84, Colo320, SW480, SPC-A1, A549, Glc-82, and Hep-2), a monkey cell line (Vero E6), and a mouse cell line (CHO) were obtained from Wuhan Institute of Virology (Wuhan, China). To establish the ACE or ACE2 expressing cell lines, the cDNA of human ACE (gift from Dr. Pierre Corvol)
Scientists are part of a worldwide community because they don't find many people who really understand what keeps them awake at night. If only three people really can understand you, then it doesn't matter from which part of the world they come from. This was even the case with scientists from the US and the Soviet Union working together in the coldest days of the cold war.
Scientists share knowledge and tools, and in this case the cell lines are tools. For example, a cell line with cells that have much more ACE2 than normal makes it easy to test if a virus uses ACE2 as entry point, it will infect these cells faster if so.
More important than the scientists are the sponsors because they determine the direction. Some of them wanted the scientists creating SARS version 2.0, and they were successful.
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