WASHINGTON (AP) – US scientists would gain broadly expanded resources to identify potentially more deadly coronavirus mutations under legislation in progress in Congress. A House bill forwarded for debate in the plenary would provide $ 1.75 billion for genomic sequencing.
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The United States now maps only the genetic makeup of a tiny fraction of positive virus samples, a situation that some experts liken to flying blind. This means that the true domestic spread of problematic mutations first identified in the UK and South Africa remains a matter of conjecture.
This ignorance can be costly. One concern is that more transmissible forms, such as the UK variant, may move faster than the country’s ability to place the vaccine in the arms of Americans.
“You have a small number of academic and public health labs that basically do genomic surveillance,” said David O’Connor, an AIDS researcher at the University of Wisconsin. “But there is no national coherence for the strategy.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are trying to guide these efforts, in line with the government’s advanced detection work, but the COVID-19 legislation would take hunting to another level.
In addition to money, the House bill that was approved by the Energy and Trade Committee last week calls on the CDC to organize 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 legislation that would provide $ 2 billion. Baldwin says the United States should use genetic mapping technology to analyze at least 15% of positive virus samples. This may not seem like much, but the current rate is believed to be 0.3% to 0.5%. Analyzing 15% of positive samples would increase surveillance by at least 30 times.
“Variants pose a growing threat,” said Baldwin. “At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, increasing our testing capacity was essential to our ability to track and slow the spread of the virus – the same is true for finding and tracking these variants. “
Genomic sequencing essentially involves mapping an organism’s DNA, the key to its unique characteristics. It is made by high-tech machines that can cost anywhere from several hundred thousand dollars to $ 1 million or more. Technicians trained to operate the machines and computing capacity to support the entire process add costs.
In the case of the United Kingdom variant first detected in England, changes in the virus have allowed it to spread more easily and are believed to also cause the most deadly disease COVID-19. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle reports that transmission of the UK variant has been confirmed in at least 10 U.S. states. CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told governors on Tuesday that she could become dominant in late March.
The sequencing of 0.3% to 0.5% of virus samples, as the United States is now doing, “simply does not give us the ability to detect strains as they develop and become dominant,” said Dr. Phil Febbo, medical director of Illumina, a San Diego-based company that develops genomic sequencing technologies.
The Biden government has to “set a very clear goal,” he added. “What hill are we going to charge?”
“We need this data. Otherwise, somehow, we will be flying blind, ”said Esther Krofah, who heads the Milken Institute’s FasterCures initiative. “We don’t understand the prevalence of mutations that we should be concerned about in the US”
Even more worrying than the UK variant is a strain first detected in South Africa that scientists suspect may lessen the protective effect of some of the coronavirus vaccines. This variant has also been identified in the USA in a limited number of cases.
The White House coronavirus coordinator, Jeff Zients, called the United States’ screening for virus mutations “totally unacceptable”, saying the country ranks 43rd in the world. But the Biden government has not set a target for the level of mapping of the virus gene that the country should pursue.
At the University of Wisconsin, AIDS scientist O’Connor said that he and his colleagues started sequencing coronavirus samples from the Madison area “because that’s where we live.”
His colleague, virology expert Thomas Friedrich, said a national effort will require more than money to buy new genomic sequencing machines. The CDC will have to set standards for state health authorities and academic research institutions to fully share the information they collect from analyzing virus samples. Currently, there is a mishmash of state regulations and practices, and some of them restrict access to important details.
“We need to see this as a Manhattan Project or an Apollo program,” said Friedrich, invoking the government-led scientific efforts that developed the atomic bomb and put men on the moon.
The UK was 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 that happened, there is a greater urgency about genetic sequencing on this side of the Atlantic Ocean.
“The usefulness of doing this may not have been so apparent to so many people until these variants started to appear,” said Friedrich.
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