UK's premier research institute underlines future pandemic response focus areas to WHO

Last week, the Chief Medical Officer of England, Sir Chris Whitty, and the Director General of the World Health Organisation (WHO), Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, met researchers at Francis Crick Institute to discuss how to gather intelligence and prepare for future pandemics.

The two policymakers heard what scientists had to say regarding the necessary steps to be pandemic-ready. The processes and the knowledge gained from the COVID-19 pandemic are likely to assist in countering future pandemics and disease outbreaks. The key part of the discussion involved virus surveillance.

Areas to focus on for better pandemic response

The institute has brought together scientists from all over the world across different fields to develop high-end facilities which were toured by health and policy experts of the Health and Social Care Department of WHO. The scientists working in the Institute underlined three major areas to focus on

• to enhance the understanding of the disease, that is the infection biology, the immune response it's generating,
• to track the variants that are emerging
• to develop vaccines and other treatments by using the above two research information

Underlining the importance of this, David LV Bauer from the RNA Virus Replication Laboratory of Francis Crick Institute said that this chronology is extremely important to understand as scientists might not be able to create effective vaccines as quickly as they did during the COVID-19 pandemic.

For this, we need to understand how an effective immune response works, why certain groups of people are more vulnerable and why certain variants are more destructive than others.

For this purpose, scientists have created a Legacy Study project which can track the various factors pertaining to a pandemic and disease spread. Factors such as medical history, ethnicity, gender, age and their correlation with the COVID infection spread have been studied in this regard.

The Legacy Project to tackle pandemics

The project is part of the International WWW Consortium. It has the results of three different studies in three different locations - West London, West Indies and West Africa to analyse people from different genetic diversity. Although there are some common genetic ancestry and vaccines used in the population of all three locations, they have shown distinct outcomes in the COVID-19 pandemic.

With this project, the consortium seeks to empower people regarding how to tackle future pandemics. This is especially crucial for regions and communities where virus surveillance and research are not that developed. The findings of the studies are likely to provide necessary insights into the factors governing immune response to the COVID-19 virus and its variants.

David Bauer said that this could make our approach to vaccination and treatment more equitable and targeted.

How is it done?

The Institute is already home to the Worldwide Influenza Centre

The Crick is home to one of WHO's six collaborating centres on influenza outbreaks called the Worldwide Influenza Centre which greatly helped in the surveillance of the influenza virus and tackling the disease outbreak.

It's part of the Global Influenza Surveillance and Response (GISRS) System which analyses flu samples and tracks down any changes in the viruses. This enables the WHO to draw up a plan to vaccinate people against every seasonal change in the viruses and tackle future variants that can cause epidemics and pandemics.

The same surveillance and efficiency have been used in the newly developed COVID Surveillance Unit which tracks the COVID-19 response. The scientists in this unit continuously analyse different samples of the COVID-19 virus and upgrade them for those in the vaccine development team to test different drug and vaccine regimes. This creates a repository of different treatments that are used against a virus bank.

Virus surveillance for future pandemics

The primary criteria of this surveillance won't only be to screen for variants and strains currently circulating in humans but to continuously look for new emerging ones.

The one health principle means to screen for all potential possibilities of new variants emerging. As seen in COVID-19 how viruses jumped from animals to humans, scientists in the Flu centre are screening avian flu viruses for the same threat.

How does creating vaccines help?

Establishing a regime for fast response against future variants and pandemics is Emma Wall and her team of experts at Francis Crick Institute who believes that the Legacy study would be an important tool in disease response in the future as COVID Surveillance slows down.

She says that Legacy is a sleeping protocol where everything is recorded in fine detail and plans are underlined. With this in place, we can quickly start a plan to adapt to future pandemics of different natures.

Collaboration for future pandemic response

The WHO Director-General has asked scientists at the Francis Crick Institute to chart out a plan where researchers and WHO can work together to implement this.