WASHINGTON (AP) – US Scientists Would Have Massively Expanded Abilities to Identify Potentially Deadlier Coronavirus Mutations under legislation advancing in Congress. A house law to be debated on the ground would raise $ 1.75 billion for genomic sequencing.
The US is now only mapping the genetic makeup of a tiny fraction of positive virus samples, a situation some experts liken to blind flying. It means that the true domestic spread of problematic mutations first identified in the UK and South Africa remains a matter of guesswork.
Such ignorance can prove costly. One concern is that more transmissible forms, such as the British variant, could move faster than the country’s ability to get the vaccine into the arms of the Americans.
“You have a small number of academic and public health laboratories that have basically performed the genomic surveillance,” said David O’Connor, an AIDS researcher at the University of Wisconsin. “But there is no national coherence in the strategy.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are trying to support those efforts, in line with the government’s own advanced detection work, but the COVID-19 legislation would take the hunt to another level.
In addition to money, the House bill, which approved the Committee on Energy and Trade last week, calls on the CDC to organize a national network to use the technology to detect the spread of mutations and improve public health. accompany countermeasures.
In the Senate, Wisconsin Democrat Tammy Baldwin passed legislation that would bring in $ 2 billion. Baldwin says the US should use gene mapping technology to analyze at least 15% of positive virus samples. That may not sound like much, but the current rate is believed to be 0.3% to 0.5%. Analyzing 15% of the positive samples would increase surveillance by at least 30 times.
“Variants are a growing threat,” Baldwin said. “At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, increasing our testing capacity was essential to our ability to monitor and slow the spread of the virus – the same is true for finding and tracking these variants.”
Genomic sequencing essentially maps an organism’s DNA, the key to its unique characteristics. It is done by high-tech machines that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to $ 1 million or more. Technicians trained to operate the machines and the computing capacity to support the entire process increases costs.
In the case of the British variant first discovered in England, the changes in the virus made it spread more easily and is believed to also cause more deadly COVID-19 disease. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle reports that transmission of the UK variant has been confirmed in at least 10 US states. CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told governors on Tuesday it could become dominant in late March.
Sequencing 0.3% to 0.5% of virus samples, as the US is doing now, “just doesn’t give us the ability to detect strains as they develop and become dominant,” said Dr. Phil Febbo, Chief Medical Officer for Illumina, a San Diego-based company developing genomic sequencing technologies.
Biden’s administration must “set a very clear goal,” he added. “What is the hill we are going to charge?”
‘We need that data. Otherwise we will fly blind in some respects, ”says Esther Krofah, who leads Milken Institute’s FasterCures initiative. “We don’t understand the prevalence of mutations to worry about in the US”
Even more concerning than the British variety is a strain first discovered in South Africa that scientists suspect may reduce the protective effect of some of the coronavirus vaccines. This variant has also been established in the US in a limited number of cases.
Jeff Zients, White House coordinator of the coronavirus, has called the US tracking of virus mutations “totally unacceptable,” saying the country is ranked 43rd in the world. But the Biden administration has not set a target for the level of viral gene mapping that the country should aim for.
At the University of Wisconsin, AIDS scientist O’Connor said he and his colleagues had started sequencing coronavirus samples from the Madison region “because that’s where we live.”
His colleague, virology expert Thomas Friedrich, said a national effort will require more than money to buy new genomic sequencing machines. The CDC will need to set standards for state health officials and academic research institutions to fully share the information they collect when analyzing virus samples. Currently, there is a mishmash of national regulations and practices, and some restrict access to important details.
“We have to think of this as a Manhattan project or an Apollo program,” said Friedrich, drawing on the government-led scientific efforts that developed the atomic bomb and landed people on the moon.
The UK was able to identify its variant because the national health system there has a coordinated gene mapping program that aims to sequence about 10% of the samples, he added. Since that happened, there has been more urgency for genetic sequencing this side of the Atlantic.
“The usefulness of doing this may not have been as apparent to so many people until these variants surfaced,” Friedrich said.