Scientists Tracked for Coronavirus Mutations: Coming Months Will Be Critical

In the first months of the crisis, changes in the pathogen appeared to be limited, insignificant. The Kiev genome examined by the British appeared similar to the previous one, and even experts in the field were quite skeptical of such efforts.

“People really thought it was a waste of time,” said Nick Loman, a professor of genomics and bioinformatics at the University of Birmingham who helped start the project. – It felt like “collecting very expensive stamps in a pandemic.”

Subsequently, dangerous strains of the virus that emerged in England, South Africa and Brazil dispelled any doubt about the importance of the system. Other states are rushing to catch up with the British on the sequencing area, and the Joe Biden administration announced in February that it would allocate nearly $ 200 million. Track US dollar stresses with the help of accelerated surveillance from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The Covid-19 Genomics UK Consortium, a group of British public health agencies and academic institutions, has become a global model for genome analysis to look for signs that the coronavirus is gaining power to spread or kill.

More and more scientists are closely monitoring whether new strains may be resistant to vaccines from Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca Plc., Moderna Inc. and their partners Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE, in which the world has high hopes. The coronavirus has already claimed more than 2.5 million doses worldwide. lives.

The British group, led by Cambridge University microbiologist Sharon Peacock, plans to expand training for the public, from laboratory technicians to policy makers, to strengthen surveillance around the world. As the virus spreads, there are concerns that in some regions not only are vaccines depleted, but also the ability to detect mutations that could undermine all immunization campaigns.

Virus tracking

“In many parts of the world, we do not follow the virus”, Sh. Peacock. He fears that the times will come when “the world will be divided into two parts: the areas that do not have information about the virus, cannot make full use of vaccination services and suffer high morbidity” and all the others.

The idea for a program called COG-UK grew out of early discussions with Patrick Vallance, the UK’s lead science advisor, and within just a few weeks, Sh. With Peacock turning to N. Loman and other scientists for help, the program took on real shape. They received an initial 20 million. British pounds ($ 28 million) in support of the government.

Researchers are examining samples from COVID-19 patients in regional laboratories and at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, south of Cambridge.

The genome scan rate has accelerated to 30,000 SARS-CoV-2 genomes, three times the rate of a couple of months ago. That number is more than double that of the United States, even taking into account the powerful boost given to it by the new CDC director, Ropchjelle Walesnky, who was appointed to the post in January.

To date, COG-UK has contributed nearly half of the coronavirus sequences by sharing this function with the global GISAID database. The vast majority of virus changes are harmless, but some of them are concerning.

“Advancement of evolution”

In early December, despite tighter restrictions, infection rates spiked around London and Kent in southeastern England. Researchers from the British program noticed some unusual signs. At least half of the viruses that cause the disease were genetically very similar.

A group of general changes in the virus strain stood out from the rest of the family tree data, said Nick Loman, a professor at the University of Birmingham, warning of a “breakthrough in evolution.”

A more detailed analysis showed that the strain is much easier to transfer than previous strains. Not only that, she was already on her way to other parts of the country.

Six days before Christmas, the country’s prime minister, Boris Johnson, tightened controls on movement and travel and warned with “regret” of a new and more contagious variety, called B.1.1.7. It soon spread to 50 more countries, including the United States, Australia, Germany, and Singapore.

Mutations that occurred in South Africa and Brazil at the time were able to reduce, but not extinguish, the effectiveness of the vaccines. This has given impetus to companies like Britain’s Oxford Nanopore Technologies, which manufactures equipment to detect virus sequences.

The work being done in the UK is “extremely underrated and invaluable,” said Gordon Sanghera, CEO of Oxford Nanopore.

“The virus will mutate and move. Countries that follow it recognize it intensely. It is necessary to understand who it is and act quickly,” he said.

Despite efforts to track down the virus and secure vaccine stocks, the UK is leading in Europe in terms of the number of victims of the virus. This has happened due to previous mistakes made during the pandemic, and the government is still heavily criticized for them.

With the number of new cases declining and the vaccination campaign advancing rapidly, Johnson said the end of the pandemic in England “was already in sight” and presented a plan to ease restrictions imposed by the coronavirus pandemic.

Although scientists’ knowledge of the virus has expanded enormously, there is still a lack of information about its evolution as increased interest in variants such as recombination has begun. They can occur when two different viral genomes simultaneously infect the same host cell and exchange genetic material.

“The next few months of monitoring the evolution of the virus will be critical,” said Sh. Peacock. She and her team of colleagues conduct more than 50 Zoom video calls a week, tracking the virus “without losing sight of the many mutations that appear to change the biological makeup in significant ways.”

The Cambridge researcher and her colleagues are working to make their collaboration with a couple of dozen countries more formal. To maximize the impact of their work, they seek to integrate efforts into the general work of UK public health agencies.

“We will need it during the next pandemic,” he said.

You don’t have to be rich to track viruses, Loman says. The Democratic Republic of the Congo has a fairly strong position due to its experience in monitoring the Ebola virus. But having a robust genome tracking system won’t be enough in the future, says Jeremy Farrar, director of Wellcome, the UK health research foundation.

Follow-up must be linked to a “public health response to be understood,” he said. “Otherwise, you will have thousands of strains that will be impossible to interpret without epidemiological data,” Ferrar said.

Meanwhile, vaccine developers are preparing, if necessary, to improve vaccines by adapting them to emerging strains and facing a new wave of uncertainties. The possibility that the world needs vaccines on a regular basis, as well as the need for flu vaccines that must be reformulated each year, is becoming more and more real.

“Following up on new options and efforts to curb the most worrying ones is likely to take longer in the coming years,” Loman said. “The situation can be similar to the flu and we will probably have to work on it for the rest of the time.”