CAMBRIDGE, England (Reuters) – Regular booster vaccines against the new coronavirus will be needed because of mutations that make it more transmissible and more able to evade human immunity, the head of Britain’s effort to sequence the virus’ genome told Reuters.
The new coronavirus, which has killed 2.65 million people globally since it first appeared in China in late 2019, moves once every two weeks, slower than the flu or HIV, but enough to require changes to vaccines.
Sharon Peacock, who leads COVID-19 Genomics UK (COG-UK), which has sequenced half of all Roman coronavirus genomes mapped so far globally, said international co-operation is needed to fight the “cat and mouse” virus.
“We have to appreciate that we have to always have booster doses; Coronavirus immunity does not last forever, “Peacock told Reuters at the 55-acre Wellcome Sanger Institute non-profit campus outside Cambridge.
“We have already modified vaccines to cope with what the virus does in terms of evolution – so there are variants that appear that have a combination of increased transmissibility and an ability to partially evade our immune response,” she said.
Peacock said she was confident that regular booster shots would be needed – such as for the flu – to cope with future variations, but that the speed of the vaccine’s innovation meant that these photos could be developed in rhythm and thrown to the public.
COG-UK was set up by Peacock, a professor at Cambridge, exactly one year ago, with the help of the British government’s chief scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance, as the virus spread around the globe in the UK.
The consortium of public health and academic institutions is now the world’s deepest source of knowledge about the genetics of the virus: on sites in the UK, it has sequenced 346,713 genomes of the virus in a global effort of about 709,000 genomes.
On the intellectual front of the Wellcome Sanger Institute, hundreds of scientists – many with doctorates, many who volunteer and some who listen to heavy metal or electronic rhythms – work seven days a week to map and then search the tree. Growing genealogy of the virus patterns of concern.
The Wellcome Sanger Institute sequenced more than half of the UK’s total sequenced genome of the virus after processing 19 million samples from PCR tests in one year. COG-UK sequences about 30,000 genomes a week – more than Britain did in a year.
MOVING CLUB
Three main variants of coronavirus – which were first identified in the United Kingdom (known as B.1.1.7), Brazil (known as P1) and South Africa (known as B.1.351) – are under special control.
Peacock said she is most concerned about B.1.351.
It’s more transmissible, but it also has a change in a genetic mutation, which we refer to as E484K, which is associated with reduced immunity – so our immunity is reduced against that virus, Peacock said.
With 120 million cases of COVID-19 worldwide, it’s becoming difficult to keep track of all variant alphabet soups, so Peacock’s teams are thinking in terms of “constellations of mutations.”
“So a constellation of mutations would be like a ranking, if you will – about what mutations in the genome we are particularly concerned about, E484K should be one of the top of the rankings,” she said.
“So we develop our thinking around that ranking to think, regardless of background and offspring, what mutations or constellation of mutations will be biologically important and different combinations that can have slightly different biological effects.”
Peacock, however, warned of humility in the face of a virus that has caused so much death and economic destruction.
“One of the things the virus has taught me is that I can make mistakes quite regularly – I have to be quite humble in the face of a virus that we still know very little about,” she said.
“There may be a variant that I haven’t even discovered yet.”
However, there will be future pandemics.
“I think it is inevitable that another virus will appear that is worrying. What I hope is that once we have learned what we have in this global pandemic, we will be better prepared to detect and contain it. ”
Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Kate Holton and Philippa Fletcher