CAMBRIDGE, England (Reuters) – Regular vaccinations against the coronavirus will be needed due to mutations that make it more transmissible and better able to evade human immunity, said the head of Britain’s effort to track the genome of the virus , told Reuters.
The coronavirus, which has killed 2.65 million people worldwide since it appeared in China at the end of 2019, changes every two weeks, more slowly than flu or HIV, but enough to require vaccine adjustments.
Sharon Peacock heads COVID-19 Genomics UK, which has mapped almost half of all new coronavirus genomes worldwide so far. She said international cooperation was needed in the “cat and mouse” battle with the virus.
“We need to realize that we will always have to have booster doses; the immunity to coronavirus does not last forever,” Peacock told Reuters at the 55-acre Campus Wellcome Sanger Institute outside Cambridge.
“We are already adapting the vaccines to deal with what the virus is doing in terms of evolution. So there are variants that have a combination of increased transmissibility and the ability to partially evade our immune response,” she said. said.
Peacock said she is confident that regular flu shots (such as for flu) would be needed to deal with future variants, but that the speed of innovation means these shots can be developed quickly and rolled out to the population.
We must realize that we will always need to have booster doses; immunity to coronavirus does not last forever.
–Sharon Peacock, COG-UK
COG-UK was founded exactly a year ago by Peacock, a professor at Cambridge, with the help of British chief scientific adviser Patrick Vallance, as the virus spread to Britain around the world.
The consortium of public health and academic institutions is now the world’s deepest pool of knowledge on the genetics of the virus: on websites across Britain, it has generated 349,205 genomes of the virus in succession from a worldwide effort of approximately 778,000 genomes.
On the intellectual front line at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, hundreds of scientists – many with doctoral degrees, many working on a voluntary basis and some listening to heavy metal or electronic beats – work seven days a week to map the growing pedigree of the virus for concern patterns. .
The Wellcome Sanger Institute has made more than half of the UK’s genomes of the virus in the UK consecutively after processing 19 million samples of PCR tests in a year. COG-UK arranges around 30,000 genomes per week – more than the UK has done in a year.
Mutation rankings
Three main coronavirus variants – first identified in Britain (known as B.1.1.7), Brazil (known as P1) and South Africa (known as B.1.351) – are particularly under scrutiny.
Peacock said she is most concerned about B.1.351.
“It is more transmissible, but it also has a change in a gene mutation, which we call E484K, which is associated with reduced immunity. So our immunity is reduced against the virus,” Peacock said.
With 120 million cases of COVID-19 worldwide, it’s becoming difficult to keep track of all the alphabet soups of variants, so Peacock’s teams are thinking of ‘constellations of mutations’.
One of the things the virus has taught me is that I can often go wrong – I have to be pretty humble about a virus we know very little about.
–Sharon Peacock, COG-UK
“So, a constellation of mutations would be like a ranking if you will – which mutations in the genome we are particularly concerned about, the E484K, should be one of the top of the leaderboard,” she said.
“We are therefore developing our thinking around the leaderboard to reflect, regardless of background and lineage, on what mutations or constellation of mutations are going to be biological and different combinations that may have slightly different biological effects.”
However, Peacock warned against humility due to a virus that caused so much death and economic destruction.
“One of the things the virus has taught me is that I can often be wrong. I have to be pretty humble towards a virus we still know little about,” she said.
“There may be a variant there that we have not even discovered.”
There will be future pandemics.
“I think it’s inevitable that a virus is emerging again that is of concern. What I hope is that we will be better prepared to detect and contain it, after learning what we have in this global pandemic. . “
(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Kate Holton and Philippa Fletcher)
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