B.Building on the global boom in viral surveillance during the pandemic, UK scientists on Tuesday unveiled an initiative to scale up sequencing of common seasonal respiratory insects that have received comparatively little attention.
The Respiratory Viruses and Microbiome Initiative, launched and funded by the Wellcome Sanger Institute, will track the evolution of not only SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes Covid-19, but also other coronaviruses, different families of influenza, RSV and other pathogens that usually just cause colds, but collectively trigger waves of illness each year. The researchers hope the initiative will allow them to better monitor viruses in the UK as they change, alert them to any concerning mutations and receive information on the emergence of new viruses.
“The ability to track and search for these events early is obviously a really important thing,” said Ewan Harrison, director of the initiative.
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The programme, a collaboration with the UK Health Security Agency and other scientists, hopes to generate tons of data for academics and public health officials to use in their work, and also aims to “supercharge” the research that could ultimately lead to the development of vaccines. and therapeutics, Harrison said. It is also simply a matter of better understanding these viruses. While the flu has attracted a lot of research over the years, some of the other viruses, like rhinovirus or adenovirus, aren’t as well controlled. Scientists don’t even really understand its transmission dynamics, he said.
Viral sequencing exploded during the pandemic, with global efforts helping to detect variants like Delta and Omicron (and all Omicron sub-lineages) and guide response strategies. An important moment of the pandemic was when, in early January 2020, scientists publicly disclosed the genome of the virus, which allowed first responders around the world to begin developing diagnostic tests and served as an initial weapon for vaccine development. From there, the scientists shared millions of sequences on public trackers.
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More recently, the number of covid infections being sequenced has collapsed as much of the world has moved out of the emergency phase, a trend public health officials around the world have lamented.
It is not just the detection of important new variants that sequencing can enable. Virus sequencing can help scientists trace routes of transmission, whether within a hospital or from one country to another. When combined with laboratory studies or epidemiological research, it can answer questions about the basic biology of the virus, whether the virus is becoming more transmissible, or whether the impact of an infection is changing, for example, how the Delta variant appeared to cause disease. More serious. It’s also a tool that can help track how well vaccines are holding up against evolving viruses.
Extending routine sequencing is the type of research that could be useful with other viruses. In the United States, for example, experts are trying to figure out why an anticipated wave of a rare condition similar to polio that can occur after infection with a common enterovirus never materialized last fall, despite an increase in such enterovirus infections. Researchers are exploring the virus’s genome to see if it changed in any way.
The new initiative is designed to build an infrastructure that becomes part of routine viral surveillance, but also one that can be deployed during the next epidemic or pandemic, Harrison said. During the pandemic, researchers got their first experience with sequencing data that helped inform responses to a public health crisis.
“Now it’s something that we now think is really important to build on,” Harrison said.
As the team develops the techniques and tools they will use in their project, one goal is to keep it as low as possible, with the idea that other research teams around the world can adopt such protocols. All of its methods and computational software will be freely available.
“Awareness of sequencing is incredibly widespread now, so I think there is an opportunity for this to happen globally,” said Judith Breuer, a professor of virology at University College London and one of the researchers involved in the new program. .
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Source: news.google.com