Progress made in fight against COVID-19 variants WINK NEWS – Wink News

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Were learning more each day about the impacts of COVID-19 variants on our pandemic progress.

Florida leads the country with 416 cases of the UK variant as of Tuesday. We know this strain is highly transmissible, so how can we fight it?

It can feel like a deadly game.

Its starting to feel like were in a game of chess with this virus. We made the vaccine your move, virus. Well, it created some new variants that can get around a vaccine, said Dr. Hana Akselrod, assistant professor of medicine at George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences.

In addition to three international variants, seven new variants are in the U.S., and some of those mutations impact vaccine effectiveness.

The vaccines still show efficacy against these variants, but they are not as robust as they were against the previous strain of the virus, said Dr. Bindu Mayi, professor of microbiology at NSUs College of Medical Sciences.

Why? Because our current vaccines create antigens, which target the virus spike protein and the spike is changing.

When were talking about different variants, you might get a slightly different shape of antibody that was produced before thats no longer 100% a match for that three-dimensional binding site, Akselrod said.

But were not out of moves yet. Now, researchers are looking into T-cells to help boost our immunity.

Antibodies typically are generated against whats seen on the surface so the spike protein that the virus uses to get into the cell, for instance. T-cells are generally engineered to fight against proteins that are expressed and exposed once it gets inside our cell, Mayi said.

We will probably keep playing; were in the mid-game now. And our overall goal is to drive the population of the virus down so that theres less of it out there with fewer opportunities to mutate and create newer variants, Akselrod said.

And were playing to win.

Coronaviruses are notorious for being quick to mutate. For comparison, theyre a bit slower than influenza but faster than other familiar viruses, such as measles.

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Progress made in fight against COVID-19 variants WINK NEWS - Wink News