Coronavirus: Australia lab first to grow Wuhan virus outside China, 'breakthrough' in fight against disease
For the first time, Australian scientists have grown the Wuhan coronavirus disease outside China —in a lab. This "breakthrough" could boost efforts to treat the deadly virus, according to Melbourne's Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity.
The discovery is "vitally important" and will become a critical part of the toolkit to show if vaccines work, as scientists will be able to test any potential vaccine against a lab-grown version of the disease, Dr Mike Catton, co-deputy director of Doherty Institute told ABC.
Earlier, China had shared the genetic sequence of the virus: a useful resource to those trying to create vaccines. And within hours, several experts, including scientists from the University of Queensland, came forward to design a vaccine.
Though Chinese scientists have also recreated the virus, they have not shared the virus itself. So Dr Catton and his colleagues grew the virus in their lab, after extracting it from an infected patient.
With this discovery, the Institute has become the world's first scientific lab outside of China to copy the virus. Now, the team of Australian scientists will share their discovery with the World Health Organisation (WHO) in Europe, hoping that it could help augment efforts to build better diagnostic tests and treatments.
The Wuhan coronavirus has claimed 132 lives and infected over 5,900 people in China, so far. Although there are no deaths reported outside of China, the virus has already reached 16 countries.
According to the Chinese authorities, infected patients could transmit the disease even before the symptoms appear. But the WHO and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are yet to find evidence for the same.
Nevertheless, the Australian scientists believe their discovery could help device an early-diagnosis test that could detect the virus in people who have not displayed symptoms.
"An antibody test will enable us to retrospectively test suspected patients so we can gather a more accurate picture of how widespread the virus is, and consequently, among other things, the true mortality rate," Dr Catton told BBC. "It will also assist in the assessment of the effectiveness of trial vaccines," he added.
Current treatment and the need for viral samples
Using generic information released by the Chinese scientists, the CDC is developing a diagnostic test for the Wuhan coronavirus. Currently, they are in the process of testing its efficacy. The agency will share the test with its domestic and international partners after verifying its accuracy.
"There is no proven therapy for coronavirus infection," Dr Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said during a press briefing on the nation’s response to the coronavirus.
But for now, a select number of patients in China, are being treated with antiviral drugs, including Remdesivir— initially developed as an Ebola treatment, and a drug called Kaletra, made of two separate antiviral medications.
"There's no proven efficacy of these" against the new coronavirus, Fauci said. "That is why it is so important that we get isolates (samples) of the virus."
The CDC will need viral samples to come up with a treatment. For instance, designing a therapy that will train patients’ immune cells to detect and destroy the virus, Fauci said. The agency hopes to deploy representatives on the ground in China to study isolates from infected people at the epicenter of the outbreak.
Additionally, the US health officials are working on a tight timeline: they are hoping to start an early-stage trial within the next three months.
That timeline is optimistic, and a Phase 1 trial does not mean “you have a vaccine that’s ready for deployment,” said Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services. It could take a year or more before a vaccine is ready for sale to the public, he said.