Texas researchers scour globe for sample of omicron
GALVESTON — Researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch have began engineering their own copy of the new coronavirus variant in local labs with genome data shared online. At the same time, researchers have been working to get their hands on an isolate of the virus from a person confirmed to have been infected with it.
By either method, researchers can begin answering questions about the variant, including how quickly it can spread and how resistant it is to vaccines.
Those answers probably are still weeks away, however. For now, the expert advice is to stay calm about omicron.
“I think we have some concern, but it’s too early to worry a lot about this,” said Scott Weaver, director of the Institute for Human Infections and Immunity at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. “The bad news is that this is a variant with a lot of mutations.”
Some of the mutations detected in omicron already had been detected in other variants and have been shown to make the virus more transmissible, Weaver said. Some of the other identified mutations have shown an ability to evade vaccines, he said.
The fact those mutations are showing up together is what’s causing a higher level of concern, he said.
But it remains to be seen how well the variant can spread and how bad its infections tend to be. Although omicron is spreading fast in South Africa, that might not portend a severe threat in the United States.
“The reason not to be concerned is that so far it’s not been associated with severe disease, especially in breakthrough infections,” Weaver said.
Omicron is the fifth “variant of concern” identified by the World Health Organization. Its name comes from the 15th letter of the Greek alphabet.
Such viruses mutate naturally, Weaver said. But not every variant is classified as a variant of concern. Some variants fizzle out because they don’t transmit effectively.
Variants of concern are flagged and named when they show evidence of having higher transmissibility, causing more severe disease or being able to avoid antibodies.
The medical branch’s infectious disease laboratories are ready to study the variant’s transmissibility and its interactions with vaccines, said Pei-yong Shi, a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology.
But to do that, the medical branch and other labs need something to study — either a live sample taken from an infected person or an engineered sample grown in a lab. Because of the dozens of individual mutations detected in omicron, it could take up to three weeks for a lab-grown sample to be ready, Shi said.
The hope is researchers in Africa or another part of the world will be able to isolate and share the virus with the medical branch sooner than that, Shi and Weaver said.
Once a sample is available, researchers will study how well vaccines work against the virus, as well as how therapeutic treatments affect the variant, Shi said.
“In terms of prevention and treatment, those are the first things we need to do,” Shi said.
With studies into the variant just beginning, health officials are continuing to recommend that people protect themselves by getting vaccinated or getting a vaccine booster. While there’s little information about omicron’s reaction to vaccines, research on other variants has shown vaccines are effective at preventing serious illness and death from mutant strains of the virus.
Drugmakers Pfizer and Moderna already have said they are prepared to reformulate their vaccines if omicron shows it can evade them.