CAMBRIDGE, England (Reuters) – Regular booster vaccines against the novel coronavirus will be needed due to mutations that make it more transmissible and able to bypass human immunity, says head of UK effort to sequence virus genomes .
The new coronavirus, which has killed 2.65 million people worldwide since it emerged in China in late 2019, mutates about once every two weeks, slower than influenza or HIV, but enough to require adjustments to vaccines.
Sharon Peacock, head of COVID-19 Genomics UK (COG-UK), which has mapped half of all new coronavirus genomes worldwide to date, said international cooperation was needed in the ‘cat and mouse’ fight against the virus.
“We have to realize that we would always need booster doses; immunity to coronavirus doesn’t last forever, ”Peacock told Reuters on the 55-acre campus of the Wellcome Sanger Institute, outside Cambridge.
“We are already adapting the vaccines to deal with what the virus is doing in terms of evolution – so there are variants that have a combination of increased transmissibility and the ability to partially evade our immune response,” she said.
Peacock said she was confident that regular booster shots – such as for flu – would be needed to address future variants, but the speed of vaccine innovation meant those shots could be developed at a rapid pace and rolled out to the population. .
COG-UK was founded by Peacock, a Cambridge professor, exactly a year ago with the help of the UK government’s chief scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance, when the virus spread to Britain around the world.
The consortium of public health and academic institutions is now the world’s deepest pool of knowledge on the genetics of the virus: at sites across Britain, it has sequenced 346,713 genomes of the virus from a global effort of about 709,000 taken.
On the intellectual frontline of the Wellcome Sanger Institute, hundreds of scientists – many graduates, many volunteer, and some listening to heavy metal or electronic beats – work seven days a week to map and then plunge into the virus’s growing family tree. look for troubling patterns.
Wellcome Sanger Institute has sequenced more than half of the total sequenced genomes of the virus in the UK after processing 19 million samples of PCR tests in a year. COG-UK sequences about 30,000 genomes per week – more than the UK used to do in a year.
MUTATION LEADER BOARD
Three main coronavirus variants – first identified in Great Britain (known as B.1.1.7), Brazil (known as P1), and South Africa (known as B.1.351) – are under scrutiny.
Peacock said she was most concerned about B.1.351.
“It’s more transmissible, but it also has an alteration 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 around the world, it’s going to be difficult to keep up with all the alphabet soup of variants, so Peacock’s teams think in terms of “ constellations of mutations. ”
“So a constellation of mutations would be like a scoreboard – which mutations in the genome we’re particularly concerned about, the E484K, has to be one of the top of the scoreboard,” she said.
“So we’re developing thinking around that scoreboard to consider, regardless of background and parentage, which mutations or constellation of mutations will be biologically important and different combinations that may have slightly different biological effects.”
However, Peacock warned against humility in the face of a virus that has brought so much death and economic destruction.
“One of the things the virus has taught me is that I can be wrong on a regular basis – I have to be very humble about a virus we know very little about,” she said.
“There may be a variant that we have not even discovered yet.”
However, future pandemics will come.
“I think it is inevitable that another virus will emerge that worries us. What I hope is that we have learned what we have in this global pandemic, that we will be better prepared to detect and control it. “
Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Kate Holton and Philippa Fletcher