A New Strategy for Staying One Step Ahead of the Virus
The hunt for the next big, bad coronavirus variant is on. Scientists around the world are sampling wastewater and amassing nose swabs from the sick; they’re scouring the microbe’s genetic code for alarming aberrations. The world of outbreak surveillance “is all virus,” says Danny Douek, an immunologist at the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases. We’re laser-focused on getting eyes on a variant that would be well-equipped to wallop us, then alerting the globe. But that, Douek told me, is just one half of the infectious playing field where offense and defense meet.
The powers of pathogens change over time; so do those of the molecules and cells that our bodies use to fight them, including and . Preparedness, Douek said, means keeping good tabs on both. So in the same way we survey viruses to see how they’re evolving over time, we might do well to canvass too. Monitoring the status that could tell us “when immunity wanes, and when it needs to be augmented,” says John Wherry, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania. One obvious spot to start is with mass antibody testing, or serology, to figure out how drastically and quickly antibody levels are changing over time, and in whom. We could get a rough sense of which members of the population might be most susceptible in the event of another surge and prioritize them for boosters, tests, treatments, and more.
