CAMBRIDGE, England (Reuters) – Regular booster vaccines against the new coronavirus will be needed because of mutations that make it more transmissible and better able to escape human immunity, the head of the British effort to sequence the virus’s genomes told Reuters.
The new coronavirus, which has killed 2.65 million people worldwide since it appeared in China in late 2019, mutates once every two weeks, more slowly than the flu or HIV, but enough to demand adjustments to vaccines.
Sharon Peacock, who heads COVID-19 Genomics UK (COG-UK), which has sequenced half of all new coronavirus genomes so far mapped globally, said international cooperation is needed in the “cat and mouse” battle against the virus
“We have to recognize that we would always have to take booster doses; Coronavirus immunity doesn’t last forever, ”Peacock told Reuters on the Wellcome Sanger Institute’s 55-acre campus outside Cambridge.
“We are already adjusting vaccines to deal with what the virus is doing in terms of evolution – so there are variants emerging that have a combination of increased transmissibility and an ability to partially evade our immune response,” she said.
Peacock said he was confident that regular booster shots – as for the flu – will be needed to deal with future variants, but that the speed of vaccine innovation means that these injections can be developed at an accelerated rate and distributed to the population.
COG-UK was created by Peacock, a Cambridge professor, exactly a year ago with the help of the British government’s leading scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance, as the virus spread throughout the world to Britain.
The consortium of academic and public health institutions is now the world’s most in-depth knowledge of the genetics of the virus: in locations across Britain, it has sequenced 346,713 virus genomes in a global effort of some 709,000 genomes.
On the intellectual frontline of the Wellcome Sanger Institute, hundreds of scientists – many with PhDs, many working as volunteers and some listening to heavy metal or electronic beats – work seven days a week to map and then research the growing family tree of the virus in search of patterns of concern.
The Wellcome Sanger Institute sequenced more than half of the total sequenced genomes of the virus in the UK after processing 19 million PCR test samples in one year. COG-UK is sequencing about 30,000 genomes a week – more than the UK used to do in a year.
MUTATION LEADERBOARD
Three major variants of the coronavirus – which were first identified in Great Britain (known as B.1.1.7), Brazil (known as P1) and South Africa (known as B.1.351) – are under particular scrutiny.
Peacock said he was more concerned with B.1.351.
“It is more transmissible, but it also has a change in a genetic mutation, which we call E484K, which is associated with reduced immunity – so our immunity is reduced against this virus,” said Peacock.
With 120 million cases of COVID-19 worldwide, it is becoming difficult to keep up with the whole alphabet soup of variants, so Peacock’s teams are thinking in terms of “mutation constellations”.
“So a constellation of mutations would be like a classification table, if you prefer – which mutations in the genome we are particularly concerned with, E484K should be at the top of the classification,” she said.
“Therefore, we are developing our thinking around this ranking table to think, regardless of history and lineage, which mutations or constellation of mutations will be biologically important and different combinations that may have slightly different biological effects.”
Peacock, however, warned of humility in the face of a virus that caused so many deaths and economic destruction.
“One of the things the virus taught me is that I can be wrong quite regularly – I have to be very humble in the face of a virus that we know very little about yet,” she said.
“There may be a variant that we haven’t even discovered yet.”
However, there will be future pandemics.
“I think it is inevitable that another virus of concern will emerge. What I hope is that, having learned what we have in this global pandemic, we are better prepared to detect it and contain it. “
Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge; Kate Holton and Philippa Fletcher edition