Genomics researchers have named the variant B.1.526. It occurs in people affected in different neighborhoods of New York City, they said, and it is “scattered in the Northeast.”
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, the more likely the viruses will change. A patient’s body will be loaded with billions of copies of a virus, and may be slightly altered or mutated. Most will come and go.
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 better transmittance or the ability to evade treatments and vaccines, doctors start to worry.
The mutation in this variant that most concerned researchers is called E484K, and it gives the virus the ability to slip past some of the body’s immune response, as well as the permissible monoclonal antibody treatments. This mutation shows up independently in many different cases, but also occurs in a particular variant: the variant called B.1.526.
“It is this new variant that has been growing alarmingly in our patient population in recent weeks,” the Columbia team wrote in a copy of their report to CNN.
“We see the detection rate of this new variety increasing in recent weeks. One concern is that it is starting to overtake other species, just like the British and South African varieties,” Ho told CNN.
“However, we don’t have enough data to make this point clear now.”
But the E484K mutation is seen in at least 59 different lines of coronavirus, they said – meaning it is evolving independently across the country and around the world in a phenomenon known as convergent evolution. It can give the virus an advantage.
“Everything we know about this key mutation suggests that it appears to escape the pressure of antibodies,” said Ho.
On Tuesday, two teams reported on another variant that appears to be on the rise in California.
They are concerned that the variant is not only more contagious, but can also cause a more serious illness. As with the New York reports, their research is in its infancy, has not been published or peer-reviewed, and needs more work.
A team from the University of California, San Francisco, tested virus samples from recent outbreaks in California and found it to be much more common. It was not seen in samples from September, but 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 bit that attaches to cells that the virus infects.
“A specific mutation, the L452R mutation, in the receptor binding domain of the spike protein, may allow the virus to couple more efficiently to cells. Our data shows that this is probably the main mutation that makes this variant more infectious” says Dr. Charles Chiu, associate director of the clinical microbiology lab at UCSF, who led one of the studies, told CNN.
And they found some evidence that it is more dangerous. “In this study, we observed an increased disease severity associated with the B.1.427 / B.1.429 infection, including an increased risk of high oxygen demand,” they wrote in their report, which was published later this week on a pre-print server is installed. after public health officials in San Francisco review it.
Chiu said it should be designated as a form of care and identified as a priority for study.
A second team at Unidos and Salud, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that offers rapid testing in San Francisco’s Mission District, tested 8,846 people in January and sequenced 630 of the samples. They also found a rapid increase in the variant.
“The study results indicate that the L452R variant represents 53% of positive test samples collected between January 10 and 27. That is a significant increase from November when our sequencing indicated that this variant included only 16% of positive tests , “Dr. Diane Havlir, an infectious disease expert at UCSF who is helping lead the study, said in a statement.
Havlir’s team is also preparing the findings for publication.