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The new strain appeared in Europe in February, quickly migrated to the east coast of the United States, and has been the dominant strain worldwide since mid-March, the scientists wrote.
In addition to spreading faster, people may be vulnerable to another infection after the first attack, the report warns.
The 33-page report was published Thursday on BioRkiv, a website that researchers use to share their work before the peer review, in a bid to accelerate collaboration with scientists working on vaccines or treatments against COVID-19. This research relies heavily on the genetic inheritance of previous strains and may not be effective compared to the new one.
The mutation identified in the new report affects the now infamous spikes on the outside of the coronavirus, which allow it to enter human respiratory cells. The report’s authors said they felt an “urgent need for early warning” for vaccines and drugs to be developed around the world to be effective against the mutated strain.
Wherever the new strain appeared, it quickly infected many more people than previous strains that came from Wuhan, China, and within weeks, was the only prevalent strain in some countries, according to the report. . The new strain’s dominance over its predecessors shows that it is more infectious, according to the report, though exactly why is unknown.
The coronavirus, known to scientists as SARS-CoV-2, has infected more than 3.5 million people worldwide and has caused more than 250,000 deaths from COVID-19 since its discovery late last year.
The report is based on a computer analysis of more than 6,000 sets of coronaviruses from around the world, compiled by the Global Influenza All Data Sharing Initiative, a public-private organization in Germany. Time and again, the analysis found that the new version is becoming dominant.
A Los Alamos team, assisted by scientists from Duke University and the University of Sheffield in England, identified 14 mutations. These mutations occurred between nearly 30,000 base pairs of RNA that other scientists say make up the coronavirus genome. The report’s authors focused on a mutation called D614G, which is responsible for changing the spikes in the virus.
“The story is troubling because we see that the mutated form of the virus develops very rapidly and becomes the dominant form of the pandemic during the month of March,” wrote study director Beth Corber, a computer biologist from Los Alamos. , on their Facebook page. “When viruses with this mutation enter the population, they quickly begin to contract a local epidemic, making them more transmissible.”
Although the Los Alamos report is highly technical and has not been completed, Korber expressed deep personal feelings regarding the consequences of that finding in his Facebook post.
“This is difficult news,” Corber wrote, “but please do not be the only one to lose heart.” “Our team at LANL has been able to document this mutation and its impact on transmission only because of the huge global effort of experts and experimental groups, warning about new strains of the virus (SARS-CoV-2) in their local communities.”
Korber, who received his PhD in chemistry from Kaltek, joined the group in 1990 and focused most of his work on the HIV vaccine. In 2004, he received the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award, the highest recognition from the United States Department of Energy for his scientific achievements. He also helped establish an orphanage for young AIDS victims in South Africa.
The report contains a regional breakdown of when the new strain of the virus first appeared and how long it took to become dominant.
Italy was one of the first countries to see the new virus in the last week of February, around the same time that the original strain appeared. Washington was one of the first countries to hit the original strain in late February, but by March 15, the mutated strain dominated. New York was attacked by the original virus around March 15, but the mutant strain took over in a few days. The team did not release results for California.
Scientists at major organizations working with vaccines or drugs have told the Times that they are relying on initial evidence that the virus is stable and unlikely to mutate like the flu virus, and they demand a new vaccine every year. . The Los Alamos report could build on that assumption.
If the pandemic doesn’t seasonally go away due to hot weather, the study warns, the virus could undergo additional mutations, even when research organizations prepare the first drugs and vaccines. If we now outweigh the risk, the vaccine’s effectiveness may be limited. Some developing compounds must be attached to the spike or discontinued. If designed based on the original version of the spike, they may not be effective against the new coronavirus strain, the study authors cautioned.
“We cannot afford to be blinded as we move vaccines and antibodies into clinical trials,” Korber wrote on Facebook. “Please encourage me knowing that the global scientific community is about that and we are collaborating with each other in a way that I have never seen before … in my 30 years as a scientist.”
David Montefiori, a scientist at Duke University, who worked on the report, said he was the first to document a coronavirus mutation that appears to make him more infected.
Although the researchers still don’t know the details of how the mutated spike behaves in the body, it apparently does something that gives it an evolutionary advantage over its predecessor and encourages its rapid spread. A scientist called it a “classic case of Darwinian evolution”.
“D614G is growing at an alarming rate, indicating an advantage over the original Wuhan strain that allows it to spread faster,” the study said.
It is not yet known whether this mutated virus could explain the regional variations in severity with which COVID-19 affects different parts of the world.
In the United States, doctors have begun investigating whether new virus strains can explain differences in the number of people infected and who die from the virus, said Alan Wu, a professor at UC San Francisco who runs clinical chemistry labs. and toxicology at the General Hospital. San Francisco
Medical experts have speculated in recent weeks that they have seen at least two strains of the virus in the United States, one spread on the east coast and the other on the west coast, according to Wu.
“We want to identify the mutation,” he said, noting that his hospital had only a few deaths out of the hundreds of cases it treated, which is “a completely different story than what we heard in New York.”
A Los Alamos study does not show that the new version of the virus is more deadly than the original. People infected with the mutated strain appear to have a higher viral load. However, the authors of the University of Sheffield study found that among the local sample of 447 patients, the hospitalization rate was approximately the same in people infected with both viruses.
Even if the new strain is not more dangerous than the others, it can still complicate efforts to control the pandemic. This would be a problem if the mutated virus makes it so different from previous strains that people who have immunity to them would not be immune to the new version.
If this is really the case, it could make “people susceptible to another infection,” the study authors wrote.
It is possible that the mutation will change its appearance in some way, which helps the virus escape the immune system, said Montefiori, who has been working on the HIV vaccine for 30 years. “It is a hypothetical question and it is very difficult.”
Kurir.rs/L.A. Time
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