WASHINGTON (AP) – US scientists would gain vast capabilities to identify potentially more lethal coronavirus mutations according to legislation advancing in Congress. A House bill aimed at upstairs debate would provide $ 1.75 billion for genomic sequencing.
The US is now harassing only the genetic structure of a tiny fraction of positive virus samples, a situation that some experts liken to blind flight. It means that the real internal spread of the problematic changes first identified in the United Kingdom and South Africa remains a matter of assumption.
Such ignorance could prove costly. One concern is that more transmissible forms, such as the British version, could move faster than the nation’s ability to introduce the vaccine into the arms of Americans.
“You have a small number of academic and public health laboratories that have basically done genomic surveillance,” said David O’Connor, an AIDS researcher at the University of Wisconsin. “But the strategy has no national coherence.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is trying to keep up these efforts, aligning itself with the government’s advanced detection work, but COVID-19 legislation would take hunting to another level.
In addition to the money, the House bill that approved the Energy and Commerce Committee last week calls on the CDC to set up a national network to use the technology to track the spread of mutations and guide public health countermeasures.
In the Senate, Wisconsin Democrat Tammy Baldwin introduced $ 2 billion in legislation. Baldwin says the United States should use gene mapping technology to analyze at least 15 percent of positive virus samples. It may not seem like much, but it is believed that the current rate is 0.3% to 0.5%. The analysis of 15% of the positive samples would extend the surveillance at least 30 times.
“Variants are a growing threat,” Baldwin said. “At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, increasing our testing capacity was critical to our ability to track and slow the spread of the virus – the same goes for finding and tracking these variants.”
Genomic sequencing essentially involves mapping the DNA of an organism, the key to its unique features. It is made by high-tech machines that can cost from a few hundred thousand dollars to 1 million dollars or more. Technicians trained to run the machines and computing power to support the entire process add to the costs.
In the case of the British variant detected for the first time in England, the changes in the virus have allowed it to spread more easily and are also believed to cause COVID-19 disease more lethal. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle reports that the transmission of the British variant has been confirmed in at least 10 US states. CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky it told governors on Tuesday it could become dominant by the end of March.
Sequencing from 0.3% to 0.5% of virus samples, as the US does now, “does not give us the ability to detect strains as they grow and become dominant,” said Dr. Phil Febbo. chief physician for Illumina, a San Diego-based company that develops genomic sequencing technologies.
The Biden administration must “set a very clear goal,” he added. “What hill are we going to charge?”
“We need this data. Otherwise, in some ways, we fly blind, ”said Esther Krofah, who runs the Milken Institute’s FasterCures initiative. “We don’t understand the prevalence of the mutations we should be concerned about in the United States.”
Even more worrying than the UK version is a strain first detected in South Africa, which scientists suspect could diminish the protective effect of some of the coronavirus vaccines. This variant has also been identified in the USA in a limited number of cases.
Jeff Zients, the White House coronavirus coordinator, called the US tracking of virus mutations “totally unacceptable,” saying the nation ranks 43rd in the world. But the Biden administration has not set a target for what level of viral gene mapping the country should strive for.
At the University of Wisconsin, AIDS scientist O’Connor said he and his colleagues began sequencing coronavirus samples in the Madison area “because we live there.”
His colleague, an expert in virology, Thomas Friedrich, said that a national effort will require more than money to purchase new genomic sequencing machines. The CDC will need to set standards for state health officials and academic research institutions to fully share the information they gather from the analysis of virus samples. There is currently a mix of state regulations and practices, and some of them restrict access to key details.
“We have to look at this as a Manhattan project or an Apollo program,” Friedrich said, citing government-led scientific efforts to develop the atomic bomb and land people on the moon.
The United Kingdom has been able to identify its variant because the national health system has a coordinated gene mapping program that aims to sequence about 10% of the samples, he added. Since this happened, there has been a greater urgency regarding genetic sequencing on this side of the Atlantic Ocean.
“The usefulness of doing this may not have been as obvious to so many people until these variants began to appear,” Friedrich said.