CAMBRIDGE, England (Reuters) – Regular booster vaccines against the new coronavirus will be needed because of mutations that make it more transmissible and can better circumvent human immunity, Britain’s chief of staff told Reuters to sequence the genomes of the virus.
The new coronavirus, which has killed 2.65 million people worldwide since it emerged in China in late 2019, mutates once every two weeks, slower than the flu or HIV, but enough to require adjustments to vaccines.
Sharon Peacock, who heads COVID-19 Genomics UK (COG-UK), which has sequenced half of all new coronavirus genomes mapped so far around the world, said international cooperation was needed in the battle of ” cat and mouse “with the virus
“We must value that we should always have a dose of reinforcement; immunity to coronavirus doesn’t last forever, ”Peacock told Reuters on the 55-acre campus of the nonprofit Wellcome Sanger Institute outside Cambridge.
“We are already adjusting vaccines to deal with what the virus does in terms of evolution, so there are emerging variants that combine increased transmissibility and the ability to partially evade our immune response,” he said.
Peacock said he was confident that regular booster shots, such as the flu, would be needed to deal with future variants, but that the speed of the vaccine innovation meant they could develop at speed and shoot them at the population.
COG-UK was created by Cambridge professor Peacock exactly one year ago with the help of the UK government’s top scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance, as the virus spread around the world to Britain.
The consortium of academic and public health institutions is now the world’s deepest group of knowledge on virus genetics: in places across Britain, it has sequenced 346,713 virus genomes from a global effort of about 709,000 genomes. .
In the intellectual well-being of the Wellcome Sanger Institute, hundreds of scientists (many with doctorates, many working voluntarily and some listening to heavy metal or electronic rhythms) work seven days a week to map and search the tree. genealogy of the virus. patterns of concern.
The Wellcome Sanger Institute has sequenced more than half of the total virus genome in the UK after processing 19 million PCR test samples in a year. COG-UK sequences around 30,000 genomes per week, more than the UK used to do in a year.
CLASSIC OF MUTATION
Three main variants of the coronavirus, which were first identified in Britain (known as B.1.1.7), Brazil (known as P1) and South Africa (known as B.1.351), are under a special control.
Peacock said she was more concerned about B.1.351.
“It’s more transmissible, but it also has a change in a gene mutation, which we call E484K, that is associated with reduced immunity, so our immunity is reduced against that virus,” Peacock said.
With 120 million cases of COVID-19 worldwide, it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep track of the entire variant alphabet soup, so Peacock teams are thinking in terms of “constellations of mutations ”.
“So, if you will, a constellation of mutations would be like a classification table: what mutations in the genome are of particular concern to us, E484K is one of the top positions in the classification,” he said.
“So we’re developing our thinking around this classification table to think, regardless of background and lineage, about which mutations or constellations of mutations will be biologically important and different combinations that may have slightly different biological effects.”
Peacock, however, warned of humility in the face of a virus that has caused so much death and economic destruction.
“One of the things the virus has taught me is that I can make mistakes on a regular basis: I have to be very humble in the face of a virus of which we still know very little,” he said.
“There may be a variant that we haven’t even discovered.”
There will be, however, future pandemics.
“I think it is inevitable that another virus of concern will appear. What I hope is that, having learned what we have in this global pandemic, we will be better prepared to detect and contain it.
Guy Faulconbridge Reports; Editing by Kate Holton and Philippa Fletcher