The current pandemic is one in which we
have vast amounts of sequence data, many
thousand sequences of this particular
virus, which allows us an almost unique
opportunity to understand both how it is
mutating and what selection is doing on
the virus itself as well. So what we
found is that when you look at the
profile of mutation it is
extraordinarily strange and what we've
discovered is in fact that while there
are many possible mutations that could
occur in this virus mutation, unlike in
us is, not really a random process. It
looks as though we are mutating the
virus, and there are three groups who are
trying to make a vaccine by taking the
whole virus and tweaking it, and tweaking
it in a way that makes the virus okay
but not brilliant, and what this research
tells us is what you should do to make
the virus okay but not brilliant if you
actually wanted to make a less good
version of the virus what we should be
doing is mimicking the mutational
process by making a synthetic version of
the virus. The strategy that we've come
up with to attenuate it is to increase CPG
and increase U and that should make one
that our system can see that the virus
can't replicate very well but it can
replicate enough to be able to elicit an
immune response.
We're not vaccine biologists and we're
not virologists, but we've teamed up with
two groups from Edinburgh who
are virologists and who know about these
strategies to synthesize live attenuated
vaccines. So the next step is
actually to check the predictions that
we've been making using synthetic
constructs. So we can say we can actually now
have the technology now to be able to
say if this is the sequence that I want
we can go and make a virus or bit of a
virus that has exactly that sequence so
we can now test these predictions by
having different versions of the virus
and seeing in the lab whether they do
actually work as we predicted they
should work.
