This greatly understates the WIV's uniqueness here. Lots of groups study coronaviruses, but the WIV had the biggest collection of novel SARS-related viruses in the world. The proximal host of SARS-1 was found soon after the first outbreaks, but its origin in bats wasn't known until Dr. Shi discovered it.
The WIV had also proposed collaboration with UNC to engineer a virus structurally similar to SARS-CoV-2, a chimera of two novel sarbecoviruses with a human-designed FCS. This wasn't funded, but an unconfirmed leak claims the WIV continued this work alone:
> The investigators spoke to two researchers working at a US laboratory who were collaborating with the Wuhan institute at the time of the outbreak. They said the Wuhan scientists had inserted furin cleavage sites into viruses in 2019 in exactly the way proposed in Daszak’s failed funding application to Darpa.
The WIV had also proposed collaboration with UNC to engineer a virus structurally similar to SARS-CoV-2, a chimera of two novel sarbecoviruses with a human-designed FCS. This wasn't funded, but an unconfirmed leak claims the WIV continued this work alone:
> The investigators spoke to two researchers working at a US laboratory who were collaborating with the Wuhan institute at the time of the outbreak. They said the Wuhan scientists had inserted furin cleavage sites into viruses in 2019 in exactly the way proposed in Daszak’s failed funding application to Darpa.
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/article/inside-wuhan-lab-covid-p...