Brazil has managed to put together a comprehensive framework for monitoring the genetic material of the Covid-19 virus over the years of the pandemic, and this system must continue to function if the country is to seriously tackle the infectious diseases of the future.
The assessment is by Marilda Siqueira, a researcher who heads the Laboratory of Respiratory Viruses and Measles at Fiocruz and coordinates the institution’s genomic network. “It’s important to keep in mind that we are going to face new challenges of this kind. As I say in my presentations more than 20 years ago, since the time when we still used overhead transparencies instead of PowerPoint, when it comes to pandemics, we never it’s a matter of ‘if’, but of ‘when’ [algo assim vai acontecer].”
Siqueira talked to Sheet by telephone during his participation in the Sixth International Symposium on Immunobiologicals, an event organized by the Institute of Technology in Immunobiologicals of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation. The genomic surveillance carried out by her and other researchers in Brazil and around the world is what allows us to follow how the Sars-CoV-2 virus, which causes Covid-19, has undergone changes in its genetic material as it infects the human population.
These changes occur at random, due to copying errors that appear when the virus replicates in the cells it has invaded. Many of them have no effect or can even be harmful to Sars-CoV-2.
Others, however, are able to help the virus multiply more efficiently or better escape the body’s defense system, leading to the emergence of variants, such as those designated by the Greek letters delta and ômicron. So knowing what’s happening to viral genes over time is essential to tracking how it’s spreading and how vaccines and therapies might fare in the face of new versions of the coronavirus.
For the researcher, it is too early to say how this process could affect the risks brought by Covid-19 in the future. “We are still in a time of much learning. We have evolved a lot in treatments and vaccines, and he [o vírus] also evolved. Much remains to be understood.”
On the side of viral evolution, one of the big problems, she points out, is the lack of an equitable distribution of vaccines against Covid-19 worldwide. Although currently available immunizations cannot completely stop the spread of the virus, places with high vaccination rates are much less likely for Sars-CoV-2 to multiply than countries in which relatively few people have received vaccines. It is in these places that the pathogen is most likely to give rise to dangerous new variants.
“Therefore, several countries are discussing the issue of the long-term sustainability of genomic monitoring. I recently attended a WHO meeting [Organização Mundial da Saúde] in Italy on this topic. Sharing genomic data involves a number of sensitive issues, but it is very important to increase the speed at which detection of a new pathogen is reported,” helping to coordinate public health measures, she says.
On the Brazilian side, Siqueira recalls that, at the beginning of the pandemic, the country struggled to expand its monitoring system, in part because of the input crisis. The issue is that the devices and raw materials used to sequence (“read”) the genetic material are not produced in Brazil, and the high demand in developed countries has made manufacturing companies prioritize long-time customers in these locations.
After this initial blow, however, state research funding agencies, such as Fapesp and Faperj (in São Paulo and Rio, respectively), as well as the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation and the Ministry of Health, managed to obtain sufficient funding. so that the genomic diversity of Sars-CoV-2 could be followed relatively reliably across the country.
Siqueira highlights, for example, that all the so-called Lacen (Central Public Health Laboratories, linked to the Ministry of Health), present in each of the capitals, now have sequencing devices that allow this work to be carried out. “It could have been faster, perhaps, but the challenges are being overcome”, she summarizes.
Continuing funding for this networking would help to understand, for example, whether Covid-19 will begin to have a seasonal behavior similar to other respiratory viruses, such as those that cause influenza, whose impact on the population tends to be concentrated in the autumn and winter months in the South and Southeast regions.
“The ideal would be to extend this monitoring to several respiratory viruses, including not only Sars-CoV-2 and influenza viruses [da gripe] as well as respiratory syncytial virus [causador da bronquiolite, frequente em bebês e crianças pequenas]”, he says.
Influenza viruses, many of which also circulate among wild birds and domestic animals such as chickens, ducks and pigs, have always been seen as candidates for causing future pandemics. The leap of new forms of the influenza virus from animals to humans is one of the most potentially delicate points in this regard.
“The monitoring of these cases is something that we still need to improve a lot. We have some specific data, in municipalities of Santa Catarina and other regions where swine and poultry farming is quite intense”, says Siqueira.
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