RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) – The Brazilian P1 coronavirus variant, behind a deadly COVID-19 wave in the Latin American country that has raised international alarm, is mutating in ways that could better enable it to evade antibodies, according to scientists studying the virus.
Research by the Fiocruz public health institute into the variants circulating in Brazil has found mutations in the spike region of the virus used to invade and infect cells.
Those changes, the scientists said, could make the virus more resistant to vaccines – which target the spike protein – with potentially dire consequences for the severity of the outbreak in Latin America’s most populous nation.
“We believe it is another escape mechanism that the virus creates to bypass the antibody response,” said Felipe Naveca, one of the study’s authors and part of Fiocruz in the Amazon city of Manaus, where the P1 variant is produced. believed to have originated. .
Naveca said the changes appeared to be similar to the mutations seen in the even more aggressive South African variant, against which studies have shown that some vaccines have significantly reduced efficacy.
“This is especially concerning as the virus is evolving at an ever faster rate,” he added.
Studies have shown that the P1 variant is as much as 2.5 times more contagious than the original coronavirus and more resistant to antibodies.
On Tuesday, France suspended all flights to and from Brazil in an effort to prevent the spread of the variant as Latin America’s largest economy becomes increasingly isolated.
The variant, which has quickly become dominant in Brazil, is believed to be a big factor behind a massive second wave that has brought the country’s death toll to over 350,000 – the second highest in the world after the United States.
The outbreak in Brazil is also affecting increasingly younger people, with hospital data showing that in March more than half of all ICU patients were 40 years old or younger.
For Ester Sabino, a scientist at the University of Sao Paulo School of Medicine who led the first coronavirus genome sequencing in Brazil, the mutations of the P1 variant are not surprising given the rapid rate of transmission.
“If you have a high level of transmission, like you currently have in Brazil, your risk of new mutations and variants increases,” she said.
Fiocruz researchers, including Naveca, also recently described a new variant descending from a lineage other than P1, and detected it in the northeast of the country, which carried 14 defning mutations, including the E484K change first noticed in the South African variant (bit.ly/2RBhLKD).
So far, vaccines such as those developed by AstraZeneca and Sinovac of China have been shown to be effective against the Brazilian variant P1, but Sabino said further mutations could put that at risk.
“It’s a real possibility,” she said.