Omicron arrived in the Francis Crick Institute on Thursday. Elsewhere in Britain the new variant was being distributed with little ceremony — a sneeze in a pub, a cough in a train carriage, a rousing hymn at church.
Here, though, 10,000 particles of the virus came by courier, wrapped in a “Russian doll” of protection. “You’ve got a tube sealed in another tube in a sealed tube inside of another box inside of a cool pack inside of another box inside a cardboard box,” said Dr David LV Bauer, who with other virologists has been working to unwrap that package, grow the contents and prepare it for analysis.
Those particles originated from someone in Britain who fell ill, went for a test and learnt they had Omicron. The sample was rushed to Oxford and became the seed stock to be sent by a national collaboration called the G2P-UK Consortium to British laboratories including the Crick in north London.
When the virus arrived, it was transferred to a biosecurity level three laboratory. Those in the lab not only require protective equipment but literally work in a different environment: the air pressure is kept negative so that if there are leaks the air rushes in rather than out.
Their job for the past four days has been to make the virus happy. After pouring it on to genetically modified monkey cells, staff stayed over the weekend to ensure that the virus had precisely the conditions it needed to infect them, multiply in them and thrive. This morning it will be ready to harvest.
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That is when it will become less happy: the virus is about to be exposed to the antibodies of vaccinated people. Starting this week, their blood will be successively diluted and mixed with the virus. What scientists are interested in is the dilution where it stops working — what is the minimum level of antibodies needed before they no longer prevent the virus from infecting a set proportion of cells on a petri dish? This won’t tell us whether vaccines will prevent serious disease but it will give us a good clue as to whether they will prevent infection.
Why do we need yet more iterations of the same experiment? It is because there are so many experiments that need to be done. Two years into a pandemic there is no such thing any more as a standard immune system. “We are all really, really different, even within one country now,” said Bauer. “It’s not just Oxford versus the Pfizer vaccine. This is prior exposure, dosing intervals, age.”
In the laboratory they have hundreds of blood samples, taken from healthcare workers and Crick employees in collaboration with University College London Hospital over the past year. Each has a different immunological history — healthcare workers, for instance, will have had earlier vaccines, with shorter dosings and might well have been infected by two different variants.
Each sample will give us clues as to what Omicron can and cannot do. Together, they will also help understand something even more important: how tough it might get in the winter ahead.
