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REGULAR BOOSTER VACCINES TO WIN BATTLE VS COVID: GENOME EXPERT
- By The Financial District
- Mar 16, 2021
- 2 min read
Regular 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 effort to sequence the virus’s genomes told Guy Faulconbridge of Reuters.
Sharon Peacock, who heads COVID-19 Genomics UK (COG-UK) which has sequenced nearly half of all the novel coronavirus genomes so far mapped globally, said international cooperation was needed in the “cat and mouse” battle with the virus.
“We have to appreciate that we were always going to have to have booster doses; immunity to coronavirus doesn’t 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 doing in terms of evolution - so there are variants arising that have a combination of increased transmissibility and an ability to partially evade our immune response,” she said.
Peacock added she was confident regular booster shots - such as for influenza - would be needed to deal with future variants but that the speed of vaccine innovation meant those shots could be developed at pace and rolled out to the population.
COG-UK was set up by Peacock, a professor at Cambridge, exactly a year ago with the help of the British government’s chief scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance, as the virus spread across the globe to Britain.
The consortium of public health and academic institutions is now the world’s deepest pool of knowledge about the virus’s genetics: At sites across Britain, it has sequenced 349,205 genomes of the virus out of a global effort of around 778,000 genomes.
Three main coronavirus variants - which were first identified in 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 she was most worried about B.1.351. “It is more transmissible, but it also has a change in a gene mutation, which we refer to as E484K, which is associated with reduced immunity - so our immunity is reduced against that virus,” Peacock said.
