CAMBRIDGE, England (Reuters) – Regular booster vaccines against 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 coronavirus, which has killed 2.65 million people worldwide since it first appeared in China in late 2019, mutates once every two weeks, more slowly than the flu or HIV, but enough to require adjustments vaccines.
Sharon Peacock runs COVID-19 Genomics UK, which has sequenced almost half of all new coronavirus genomes so far mapped globally. She said that international cooperation is needed in the “cat and mouse” battle against the virus.
“We have to recognize that we would always have to receive booster doses; immunity to coronavirus does not last forever,” Peacock told Reuters on the nonprofit campus of the Wellcome Sanger Institute, 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 the 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.
We have to recognize that we would always have to take booster doses; immunity to coronavirus does not last forever.
–Sharon Peacock, COG-UK
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 profound knowledge of the genetics of the virus: in locations across Britain, it has sequenced 349,205 virus genomes in a global effort of some 778,000 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 the growing family tree of the virus in search of worrying patterns.
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 classification table
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 mutation of the gene, which we call E484K, which is associated with reduced immunity – so our immunity is reduced against this virus,” said Peacock.
With 120 million boxes of COVID-19 worldwide, it is becoming difficult to track the entire alphabet soup of variants, so Peacock’s teams are thinking in terms of “mutation constellations”.
One of the things that the virus has taught me is that I can make mistakes quite regularly – I need to be very humble in the face of a virus about which we still know very little.
–Sharon Peacock, COG-UK
“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 classification 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 have not yet discovered.”
However, there will be future pandemics.
“I think that another worrying virus is inevitable. What I hope is that, having learned what we have in this global pandemic, we will be better prepared to detect it and contain it.”
(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Kate Holton and Philippa Fletcher)
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