WASHINGTON (AP) – US scientists would gain greatly expanded capabilities to identify potentially deadly coronavirus mutations according to legislation advancing in Congress. A House bill aimed at debating at the plant would provide $ 1.75 million for genomic sequencing.
The United States now maps only the genetic composition of a tiny fraction of positive virus samples, a situation that some experts seem to fly blindly to. It means that the true national spread of problematic mutations first identified in the UK and South Africa remains a matter of riddles.
This ignorance can be costly. One concern is that more transmissible forms such as the UK variant could advance faster than the nation’s ability to introduce the vaccine into the arms of Americans.
“You have a small number of academic and public health labs that have basically been doing genomic surveillance,” said David O’Connor, an AIDS researcher at the University of Wisconsin. “But the strategy has no national coherence.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is trying to monitor these efforts, aligning itself with the government’s own advanced detection work, but COVID-19 legislation would take the hunt to another level.
In addition to money, the House bill authorized by the Energy and Commerce Committee last week calls for the CDC to set up a national network to use technology to track the spread of mutations and guide public health countermeasures.
In the Senate, Wisconsin Democrat Tammy Baldwin has introduced legislation that would provide $ 2 billion. Baldwin says the U.S. should use gene mapping technology to analyze at least 15 percent of positive virus samples. This may not sound like much, but the current rate is believed to be 0.3% to 0.5%. Analyzing 15% of the positive samples the surveillance is extended at least 30 times.
“Variants pose a growing threat,” Baldwin said. “At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was essential to increase our testing capacity for our ability to track and slow the spread of the virus; the same goes for finding and tracking these variants.”
Genomic sequencing is essentially the mapping of an organism’s DNA, the key to its unique characteristics. They do high-tech machines that can cost from several hundred thousand dollars to a million dollars or more. Technicians trained to operate the machines and the computing power to support the entire process add to the costs.
In the case of the UK variant first detected in England, changes in the virus allowed it to spread more easily and are also believed to cause the most deadly COVID-19 disease. The Seattle Institute of Health Metrics and Assessment reports that transmission of the UK variant has been confirmed in at least ten U.S. states. CDC Director, Dra. Rochelle Walensky he told governors on Tuesday that he could become dominant in late March.
Sequencing 0.3% to 0.5% of virus samples, as the U.S. does now, “does not give us the ability to detect strains as they develop and become dominant,” said Dr. Phil. Febbo, chief physician at Illumina, a San Diego-based company that develops genomic sequencing technologies.
The Biden administration must “set a very clear goal,” he added. “What hill are we going to charge?”
“We need this data. Otherwise, in a way we’re flying blind, “said Esther Krofah, who runs the Milken Institute’s FasterCures initiative.
Even more troubling than the UK variant is a strain first detected in South Africa that scientists suspect may diminish the protective effect of some of the coronavirus vaccines. This variant has also been identified in the United States in a limited number of cases.
White House coronavirus coordinator Jeff Zients has called U.S. monitoring of virus mutations “totally unacceptable,” saying the nation ranks 43rd in the world. But the Biden administration has not set a goal in terms of the level of genetic mapping of the virus to be strived for in the country.
At the University of Wisconsin, AIDS scientist O’Connor said he and his colleagues began sequencing coronavirus samples from the Madison area “because we live here.”
His colleague, virology expert Thomas Friedrich, said a national effort will require more money to buy new genomic sequencing machines. The CDC will need to set standards so that state health officials and academic research institutions can fully share the information they obtain from the analysis of virus samples. There are currently a lot of state rules and practices, and some of them restrict access to key details.
“We have to consider this as a Manhattan project or an Apollo program,” Friedrich said, citing government-led scientific efforts that developed the atomic bomb and landed the men on the moon.
The UK was able to identify its variant because the national health system has a coordinated gene mapping program that aims to sequence approximately 10% of the samples, he added. Since this happened, there has been a greater urgency about genetic sequencing on this side of the Atlantic Ocean.
“The usefulness of doing this may not have been so obvious to so many people until these variants began to appear,” Friedrich said.