Inside the race to test omicron’s true threat
‘‘ THE VIRUS HAS PROVED TO US THAT IT HAS AN UNCANNY ABILITY TO EVOLVE RAPIDLY, AND IT HAS THE ABILITY TO CHANGE IN A WAY THAT DRAMATICALLY CHANGES THE VARIANT. John Mascola, director of the National Institutes of Health’s Vaccine Research Center
Microbiologist Pei-Yong Shi has studied all the variants: alpha, beta, gamma, delta, “delta-plus,” lambda and mu. So he was ready for omicron, the variant that incited global anxiety unlike any of the variants that came before.
Like most scientists, he was shocked by the sheer number of mutations. He also knew exactly what to do next.
Shi runs a high-containment laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch, in Galveston, and collaborates closely with Pfizer. Over Thanksgiving, his team began engineering a replica of the new variant to test against the antibodies generated by vaccines. But it doesn’t happen overnight: It will take about two weeks to build the omicron replica, another few days to confirm that it’s an accurate facsimile, and one more week to pit the virus against blood samples from vaccinated people.
Shi and colleagues around the world are in an urgent race to gauge the danger posed by omicron, which is rapidly seeding itself everywhere. As the tally of cases mounts, what happens inside labs over the next few weeks will help scientists determine the true potential of the virus, tipping off government officials and pharmaceutical companies about whether they need to revise their global vaccination campaign.
His message: Be patient. Wait for the data.
“I think there is a lot of overreaction, and we just have to sit tight,” Shi said. “There are no results yet, these are just the mutations. What does that mean? We have to see.”
There’s no doubt that omicron is different — and worrisome. It is riddled with mutations, some known to help the coronavirus dodge the body’s immune defenses. Others are newcomers, a complete mystery. Omicron has more than 30 genetic changes in the coronavirus spike where vaccines train their firepower.
But the scientific community is focused, not freaked out — perhaps because it has seen this movie before: A new variant pops up, and everyone on the planet is desperate to know how bad it is. Science ensues.
First, researchers will test how well the virus is equipped to dodge current vaccines. At the same time, they will watch closely what happens in the real world. Most scientists are betting omicron will have some capacity to slip past the virus-blocking antibodies that form a primary line of defense — but no one knows yet how deft an escape artist it will turn out to be. Many also believe vaccines are likely to retain a level of protection, particularly against severe illness.
Even the worst-case omicron possibility — faster-than-delta transmission, a sharp erosion in the protection afforded by vaccines and higher rates of severe disease — isn’t a hopeless scenario. Companies will reboot omicronspecific vaccines and test them. Vaccine-makers have already begun adapting their vaccines as a precaution, and even ran a dress rehearsal of this strategy earlier this year, against the beta variant.
Omicron is still studded with question marks. Does it, as some preliminary data from South Africa suggest, spread more easily than delta? Can it evade the multiple lines of defense mustered by vaccines? Is it more pathogenic — capable of causing severe disease?
“Working on it! No data yet!” Penny Moore, the scientist whose laboratory in South Africa first revealed the immune-evading potential of the beta variant, wrote in an email. “We have to create the spike by introducing the many mutations, or grow the live virus.”
Matthew B. Frieman, a coronavirus expert at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, hopes samples of the virus will arrive in the next week so he can start experiments in lab dishes and vaccinated mice. Many people, including him, had shared the hope that as vaccine eligibility was expanded to younger children, it might be a last steppingstone before resuming more normal life.
Instead, his Thanksgiving was interrupted by phone calls and Zoom meetings, continuing a relentless pace of work with few slow periods since January 2020.
“There is an urgency to know, but it’s been urgent for two years,” Frieman said. “The good thing is, we know what to do. We’ve been planning for this, and we know the science to do. We know what assays work and how to do them. We have mice vaccinated and ready to be infected.”
Speculation that coronavirus vaccines could falter against omicron has sent tremors through financial markets and concern through a pandemicweary public wondering whether Christmas is canceled or travel plans need to be rescheduled. Most experts are measured.
“We’re in a position of gathering data,” said John Mascola, director of the National Institutes of Health’s Vaccine Research Center. “The virus has proved to us that it has an uncanny ability to evolve rapidly, and it has the ability to change in a way that dramatically changes the variant that is predominant in the world.”
But will omicron usurp delta, just as delta took over from alpha?
Scientists do know the path to answers. They’ve walked it many times during this pandemic.
If they decide a revised shot is necessary — far from certain at this point — the process will take about three months for the messenger RNA shots.