(CNN) – Two different teams of researchers said this week in New York City and elsewhere in the Northeastern United States have found a new variant of the coronavirus that is worrying. It carries mutations that help bypass the body’s natural immune response, as well as the effects of monoclonal antibody treatments.
Genomics researchers have named the variant B.1,526. It occurs in affected people in various neighborhoods of New York City, they said, and is “scattered in the Northeast.”
One of the mutations in this variant is the same as the disturbing change found in the variant first seen in South Africa and known as B.1,351. In a way, it also seems to evade the body’s response to vaccines. And it is becoming more common.
“We saw a steady increase in the detection rate from late December to mid-February, with an alarming rise to 12.7% in the past two weeks,” a Columbia University Medical Center team wrote in a report that has yet to be released. , although it will appear in preprint this week.
It is the latest of a growing number of viral variants to emerge in the United States, which have recorded more cases of coronavirus (28 million) than any other country and where the spread is still intense.
It’s “homegrown, presumably in New York,” said Dr. David Ho, director of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in Columbia, who led the research team, by email.
Viruses are constantly mutating. The more people are infected and the longer they are infected, the more likely viruses are to change. A patient’s body will be loaded with billions of copies of a virus and it is possible that it will change or mutate somewhat. Most will leave as they arrived.
But sometimes a mutation or pattern of mutations holds and passes on. When viruses with such patterns are more common, they are called variants. Again, it’s not uncommon for variants to emerge, but when they give the virus troubling properties, such as increased transmissibility or the ability to evade treatments and vaccines, doctors start to worry.
The mutation in this variant that most worries researchers is called E484K, and it gives the virus the ability to overcome some of the body’s immune response, as well as authorized monoclonal antibody treatments. This mutation occurs independently in many different cases, but also occurs in one particular variant: the so-called B.1,526.
“It is this new variant that has been alarmingly emerging in our patient population in recent weeks,” the Columbia team wrote in a copy of their report delivered to CNN.
‘We discovered that the detection rate for this new variant has been increasing in recent weeks. One concern is that it may outperform other strains, such as the British and South African varieties, ”Ho told CNN.
“However, we don’t have enough data to confirm this point now.”
But the E484K mutation is seen in at least 59 different coronavirus lines, they said, meaning it is evolving independently across the country and around the world in a phenomenon known as convergent evolution. You can give the virus an advantage.
“Everything we know about this key mutation suggests that it seems to escape the pressure of antibodies,” said Ho.
Separately, a team from the California Institute of Technology said they had developed a software tool that also detected the rise of B.1,526 in New York. “It appears that the frequency of the B.1.526 line in New York has increased rapidly,” they wrote in a preprint paper, a report that has not been peer-reviewed but published online.
Another variant in California
On Tuesday, two teams reported another variant that appears to be increasing in California.
They fear that the variant is not only more contagious, but can also cause a more serious illness. As with the New York reports, his research is in its early stages, has not been published or peer-reviewed, and needs more work.
A team from the University of California, San Francisco (USCF) analyzed virus samples from recent outbreaks in California and found it to be much more common. It was not seen in any sample from September, but it was found in half of the samples at the end of January.
This variant, which the team calls B.1,427 / B.1,429, has a different mutation pattern than the variants first seen in the UK, called B.1,1.7 or B.1.351. One mutation, called L452R, affects the virus’s spike protein, the part that attaches to cells that the virus infects.
A specific mutation, the L452R mutation, in the receptor binding domain of the spike protein can allow the virus to couple to cells more efficiently. Our data shows that this is probably the main mutation that makes this variant the most contagious, ”said Dr. Charles Chiu, associate director of UCSF’s clinical microbiology laboratory, who led one of the studies, at CNN.
And they found some evidence that it is more dangerous. “In this study, we observed increased disease severity associated with a B.1,427 / B.1,429 infection, including an increased risk of high oxygen demand,” they wrote in their report, which later on a prepress study. server will be published. week after public health officials in San Francisco review it.
Chiu said it should be classified as a form of care and a priority for the research.
A second team from Unidos and Salud, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that offers rapid tests in the San Francisco Mission District, screened 8,846 people in January and sequenced 630 of the viruses. They also found a rapid increase in the variant.
“Research results indicate that the L452R variant represents 53% of positive test samples collected between January 10 and January 27. That’s a significant increase from November when our sequencing indicated that this variant accounted for only 16% of positive tests, ”said Dr. Diane Havlir, an infectious disease expert at USCF who is helping lead the study, in a statement. statement.
Havlir’s team is also preparing the findings for publication.