Research teams said they found two new variants of coronavirus in New York and California, respectively. These new variants would be more contagious and more lethal than others because they evade the body’s natural immune response, as well as the effects of monoclonal antibody treatments.
A team from the Columbia University Medical Center produced a report that will come out preprinted – that is, without peer review – in the coming days where they give details of a genomic variant they call B.1,526. This mutation manifested in people from different neighborhoods in New York and, the researchers said, “is dispersed in the Northeast.”
“We observed a steady increase in the detection rate from late December to mid-February, with an alarming increase to 12.7 percent in the past two weeks,” the Columbia University researchers detailed in the report.
David Ho, director of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center at Columbia and the team that did the study, said the genomic variant is “homegrown, presumably in New York.”
“We found that the detection rate for this new variant is increasing in recent weeks. One concern is that it could be starting to outperform other strains, as are the UK and South African variants, ”Ho said. However, we don’t have enough data to confirm this point now. “
The South African variant, the researchers clarified, is seen in at least 59 different coronavirus lineages. This means that it is evolving independently in all countries. “Everything we know about this key mutation suggests that it appears to escape the pressure of antibodies,” Ho said.
Viruses have the characteristic of constantly mutating, and the more people who become infected, the greater the probability that the virus will change. However, sometimes those mutations take hold and are passed on. If viruses with such patterns become more common, they are called variants
The mutation in this variant of greatest concern to researchers is called E484K, and it gives the virus the ability to overcome part of the body’s immune response, as well as authorized monoclonal antibody treatments. This mutation is appearing independently in many different cases, but it also appears in the variant detected by the Columbia team, called B.1,526.
The research conducted at Columbia was also validated by a team from the California Institute of Technology that developed a software tool that detected the increase of B.1,526 in New York.
Another variant in California
Meanwhile, researchers in California spotted another variant that appears to be on the rise. Like the Columbia report, the investigation is in its early stages and has yet to be peer-reviewed.
A team from the University of California, San Francisco (USCF), analyzed virus samples from recent outbreaks in California and found that this variant, which the team calls B.1,427 / B.1,429, was becoming much more common. contagious and would cause the disease to be more serious and “a greater risk of high oxygen requirement”.
In the samples that were taken in September last year, the USCF team did not detect cases of B.1,427 / B.1,429, but in the samples corresponding to mid-January at least half had this new variant of coronavirus.
B.1,427 / B.1,429 has a different pattern of mutations than the variants that were first seen in the UK, called B.1,1.7 or B.1,351. One mutation, called L452R, affects the spike protein of the virus, which is the part that attaches itself to cells that the virus infects.
“A specific mutation, the L452R mutation, in the receptor-binding domain of the spike protein may allow the virus to more efficiently couple to cells. Our data shows that this is probably the key mutation that makes this variant most infectious, ”Dr. Charles Chiu, associate director of UCSF’s clinical microbiology laboratory, who led one of the studies, told CNN.
Chiu and his team analyzed 308 cases of coronavirus in San Francisco and found that a higher percentage of people had died from the new variant, compared to the previous ones.
Still, they noted that there were only 12 deaths in the group, so it is possible that the difference in deaths from one subgroup to another is not maintained in a larger sample.
What they did succeed in showing is that the new variant is at least 40 percent more effective at infecting human cells than previous variants.
F/Pagina12
F / AFP
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