A team of researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) at Galveston has developed a new system to combat the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
The new system will help unlock the researcher’s ability to quickly develop and evaluate new vaccines, diagnose COVID-19 patients, and understand how the virus has evolved.
Lead researcher Dr. Pei-Yong Shi and his team developed the system using a Reverse genetic system for COVID-19, a.k.a. SARS-CoV-2.
A Reverse genetic system is the most useful tool for studying and combatting viruses, which allows scientists to make the virus in the lab setting and manipulate it in a petri dish.
With this system, the researchers have developed a version of the COVID-19 virus that is labeled with neon green. The infected cells turn green when the labeled virus infects cells.
Shi, I.H. Kempner Professor of Human Genetics, said, “The labeled virus could be used to rapidly determine whether a patient has already been infected by the new coronavirus or evaluate how well developing vaccines are inducing antibodies that block infection of the virus.”
“The level of antibodies induced by a vaccine is the most important parameter in predicting how well a vaccine works,” he added.
“The neon green-labeled virus system allows us to test patients’ samples in 12 hours in a high-throughput manner that tests many samples at once,” Shi continued. “In contrast, the conventional method can only test a few specimens at a time with a long turnaround time of a week.”
Xuping Xie, Research Scientist at the UTMB, who designed and developed the system, said, “This technology can significantly reduce how long it takes to evaluate developing vaccines and ultimately bring them to the market.”
“UTMB will be very happy to make this technology widely available to both academia and industry researchers working to quickly develop countermeasures,” Xie added.
Co-senior author and assistant professor at UTMB, Vineet Menachery said, “The genetic system allows us to study the evolution of the new coronavirus. This will help us to understand how the virus jumped from its original host bat species to humans. It remains to be determined if an intermediate host is required for the host switch from the original bats to humans for the new coronavirus.”
“The system has provided a critical tool for the research community,” he added.
“This is another example of team science at UTMB,” said Dr. Ben Raimer, President ad interim of UTMB. “The collective effort from teams with complementary expertise worked together to deliver this exciting study. We will expand the team science to areas of clinical care and patient diagnosis by deploying the technology for serological testing.”
“This will not be the last emerging virus that plagues humanity. In the past two decades, we’ve seen other coronaviruses like SARS and MERS, as well as other viruses like Zika, Ebola, and others,” Shi said. “It’s critically important to have a system that can be used for any new future or re-emerging viruses so that we can very quickly respond to the pathogens and protect peoples’ health.”
