President Joe Biden's administration said last week it will invest $1.7 billion in monitoring new emerging COVID-19 variants that could lead to future pandemic outbreaks.
As part of the variant monitoring and tracking, Premier Medical Laboratory Services (PMLS) will launch "one of the nation's largest variant surveillance initiatives," according to Cision PR Newswire.
"We want to be proactive with these new variants in case any adjustments need to be made within the health care industry for patient care or new safety protocols need to be put into place," Kevin Murdock, PMLS founder, told Cision PR Newswire. "Data is the most vital piece in beating this pandemic, so we made this a top priority to acquire the most advanced sequencing equipment and top scientists to help monitor them."
PMLS, an advanced molecular diagnostics lab, is helping to combat the variant strains by having already begun genomic sequencing of approximately 6,000 specimens daily. PMLS plans to increase the number of daily sequenced specimens to 12,000 by next month.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, genomic monitoring will help detect COVID-19 variations and mutations that spread more quickly through the population, are more severe, evade detection with testing, decrease vaccination monoclonal antibodies susceptibility or become immune to vaccines.
The COVID-19 virus itself is structured so that each nucleocapsid protein is a viral genome. Decoding the genomic sequencing, which can mutate into a more effective strain, in terms of illness severity, will help reveal how the virus can or will evolve.
Monitoring the further mutation of the COVID-19 variant strains is critical as the standard polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests used for detection are specific to the original COVID-19 strain. Tests will have to be further developed to be able to detect the pathogens of any mutations.
According to the press release, large amounts of data gathered by the PMLS initiative may help prevent the population from experiencing a possible future surge of "cases with increased severity of symptoms."
