Scientists start to work on this new Coronavirus variant as soon as South Africa announced the spread of this new variant.
World Health Organization named this new variant Omicron. By the time WHO doing that researchers had already duplicated the world of the laboratories in Durban and elsewhere, and mapped out the genetic changes that made Omicron the new risky variant of the coronavirus linage.
The Delta variant which was originated from India made a huge impact on the world. Scientists still were not sure whether the mutations make Omicron substantially different from previous variants, although many of those mutations were familiar from other variants.
According to the scientists, it’ll take weeks of testing to give a final result of how powerful this Omicron virus is. Researchers take samples from real-world patients and look at what’s happening by testing them. They are looking to see if more and more samples turn out to be Omicron by sequencing their genomes to see if is Omicron causing the infections.
Researchers also doing tests to see if Omicron infections lead to more server disease. And also whether fully vaccinated people end up more likely to become infected with Omicron variants as opposed to other variants.
So this type of real-life testing can take months to perform.
According to a spokesperson from the vaccine maker AstraZeneca, they are already conducting research in locations where the variant has been identified, namely in Botswana and Eswatini, and it will enable them to collect real-world data of Vaxzevria against this new virus variant.
Vaccine makers take blood from vaccinated volunteers and people who have recovered from recent infections and mix it with samples of the new variant or a lab-engineered version called a pseudovirus. This is their usual technic throughout this pandemic. They are doing this to see how immune cells and proteins world against it.
Antibodies and the B cells and T cells in the blood serum do the hard work of the immune system of your body.
All the major vaccine makers such as Pfizer and its partner BioNTech, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson all say that they are starting these experiments.
According to Johnson & Johnson, they are testing blood serum from participants in completed and ongoing booster studies to look for neutralizing activity against the Omicron variant.
Researchers use this approach to demonstrate first that vaccines were likely to work to protect people against infection. Then also to show that they worked to protect people against variants such as Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Delta and also finally to provide the first evidence of waning immunity.
CNN reported that such lab-dish techniques, combined with real-life evidence, form the basis of decision-making on vaccine authorizations, approvals, and guidance on their use. And they’ll be used to tell the world about the risks of this Covid-19 variant.
Dr. Francis Collins, National Institute of Health Director, told CNN that there are two ways that they are going to figure this out. One is by laboratory experiments. To do that, they need to actually have an isolate of Omicron growing in the lab and then they mic that with serum from people who’ve been vaccinated and learn if that vaccinated serum still neutralizes the virus. And it takes a while for the virus to be grown up. There is not a lot that they can do to accelerate that.
Covid-19 Technical Lead Maria Van Kerkhove in World Health Organization told CNN that it takes some time to grow up the stock of the virus and to do that their estimation is between two and four weeks.
The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci outlined the two approaches. He told in a White House Coronavirus briefing that one of the things researchers do is they get the virus and they grow it or they put it into a modified form called a pseudovirus. And when they do that, they can get convalescent plasma, monoclonal antibodies, as well as sera, and antibodies that are induced by the vaccine to see if the antibodies neutralize the virus.
Furthermore, he said, that will give the researchers a pretty good idea as to what the level of immune evasion is. That process will take likely two weeks or more, perhaps even sooner, depending upon how well the virus grows in the isolates that they get. And in those countries in which there are a lot of and the evolutionary biologists are going to be getting a good feel as to what the competition of this virus would be with Delta variant. So to learn these things about this variant it’ll take a couple of weeks to a few weeks.
Dr. Janet Woodcock, US Food and Drug Administration acting commissioner said in a statement that the agency is working with medical product companies who do tests, therapeutics, and make vaccines to address any potential effects of the new variant.
Furthermore, Woodcock said that, historically, the work to obtain the genetic information and patient samples for variants and then perform the testing needed to evaluate their impact takes time. However, they expect the vast majority of their work to be completed in the coming weeks.
Source: CNN Health News
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