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The novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19, however, is yet to be found in the wild although it is suspected to have been transmitted from infected bats.
But the virus’s closest-known relative is the BANAL-52 strain, which was found to be carried by bats in Laos.
According to a report in the journal Nature, scientists have identified three viruses that are more than 95 percent identical to SARS-CoV-2.
The DARPA proposal, seen by Express.co.uk, to create a new virus is said to have been filed in 2018 but was leaked last month to the analysis group Drastic.
The documents appear to show scientists had planned to take the genetic sequences of known coronavirus strains to combine them into a new generation of virus.
The proposal reads: “We will compile sequence/RNAseq data from a panel of closely related strains and compare full-length genomes, scanning for unique SNPs representing sequencing errors.
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