Ordinary promoter vaccines are the future fighting with COVID-19 infection, top genome experts says

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• Source: Reuters


• Date: 15 Mar,2021

Standard booster vaccines against the novel coronavirus will be needed because of mutations that make it more transmissible and better able to evade human immunity, the head of Britain’s attempt to sequence the virus’s genomes told Reuters.

The novel coronavirus, which has killed 2.65 million individuals globally since it emerged in China in late 2019, mutates around once every 2 weeks, slower than flu or HIV, but sufficient to require tweaks to vaccines.

Sharon Peacock, who heads COVID-19 Genomics UK (COG-UK) that has sequenced nearly half of all of the novel coronavirus genomes so far mapped globally, said international cooperation was needed in the”cat and mouse” battle with the virus.

“We must appreciate that we were constantly going to have to get booster doses; immunity to coronavirus does not last forever,” Peacock told Reuters at the non-profit Wellcome Sanger Institute’s 55-acre campus outside Cambridge.

“We already are tweaking the vaccines to deal with what the virus is performing in terms of development – so there are variants arising that have a mixture of greater transmissibility and an ability to partially bypass our immune response,” she said.

Peacock said she was convinced regular booster shots – such as for flu – would be necessary to deal with future variations but that the speed of vaccine innovation meant those shots could be developed at pace and rolled out to the population.

COG-UK was founded by Peacock, a professor in Cambridge, just a year ago with the aid of the British’s government’s chief scientific advisor, Patrick Vallance, as the virus spread throughout the planet to Britain.

The consortium of public health and academic institutions has become the world’s deepest pool of knowledge about the virus’s genetics: At sites across Britain, it has sequenced 349,205 genomes of this virus out of a global campaign of around 778,000 genomes.

On the intellectual frontline in the Wellcome Sanger Institute, hundreds of scientists – many with PhDs, many working on a voluntary basis and a few listening to heavy metal or electronic beats – work seven days a week to map the virus’s growing family tree for patterns of concern.

COG-UK is sequencing around 30,000 genomes per week – more than the UK used to do in a year.

MUTATION LEADERBOARD

Three primary coronavirus variants – which were first identified in Britain (known as B.1.1.7), Brazil (known as P1)and South Africa (called B.1.351) – are under particular scrutiny.

Peacock said she was worried about B.1.351.

“It is more transmissible, but it also has an alteration in a gene mutation, which we refer to as E484K, which is associated with decreased immunity – so our immunity is decreased against that virus,” Peacock said.

With 120 million cases of COVID-19 around the world, it’s becoming hard to keep track of all of the alphabet soup of variants, so Peacock’s teams are thinking in terms of”constellations of mutations”.

“So we’re developing our thinking about that leaderboard to believe, regardless of the background and lineage, about what mutations or constellation of mutations will be important biologically and different combinations that might have slightly different biological effects.”

Peacock, though, warned of humility in the face of a virus that has brought so much death and economic destruction.

“One of the things that the virus has taught me is that I could be wrong quite regularly – I have to be rather humble in the face of a virus that we know very little about still,” she said.

“There might be a version out there which we haven’t even found yet.”

There will, though, be future pandemics.

“I think its inevitable that we will have another virus emerge that is of concern. What I hope is that having learned what we have in this global pandemic, that we will be better prepared to detect it and contain it.”