Taj Azarian, PhD, MPH, Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Burnett School of Biomedical Sciences at UCF, talks about the new Delta variant and the research his team is doing.
So talk to me a little bit about what is it that you and your colleagues are looking at?
AZARIAN: Sure. So really over the last year and a half as we responded to the pandemic, one of the things that’s become really clear is that it really takes a number of different collaborators from public health agencies at a local, state and federal level along with academics at public and private institutions and private industry partners to really mount a robust public health response to a pandemic. When we started off the pandemic a lot of these resources were very siloed and working somewhat independently and have coalesced over time. What we’re aiming to do with the Rockefeller Foundation Award is to really refine, hone, expand and then build upon those foundations to solidify them, and through that, we’re able to build more of a robust surveillance network that we can use to continue to respond to this pandemic and then prepare for future responses to any future pandemics.
With this kind of surveillance network, can you kind of visualize how that would look?
AZARIAN: Yes, absolutely. It really is focusing on genomic surveillance of the virus itself. One of the things that we identified was the cornerstone of our response was our ability to test for the virus, the presence of the virus, as well as to take that virus and sequence its genome. Then interrogate it to understand how the virus is spreading, how it’s changing over time, and then through that ,we can infer a lot of important characteristics that aid us in our response. So what this surveillance network is really trying to do is to expand our ability to be able to rapidly implement testing, as well as collection of samples from a really diverse range of areas. Historically, a lot of our samples come from our primary health care centers, so you can imagine somebody very sick going to a hospital, and those are our kind of primary sources for getting samples for this type of surveillance. What we’re aiming to do is really expand that to bring in, for example K-12 schools, if possible, private large urgent care centers or private health care providers and then bring them into that network so that we’re able to rapidly identify cases of interest and then get those samples into the pipeline to be analyzed through this genomic surveillance.
And so now that cases are going down and we have vaccines, so how would that information or that research be used currently?
AZARIAN: I think one of the things that we’ve been able to do with this surveillance is really identify variants and I’m sure that’s a word that people have heard a lot about it. It has some implications for what the next year or so of our response is going to be. We’ve been able to do that through interrogating those genomes. I think as we transition now from this period where we’re going to vaccine implementation to having the emergence or surveilling for the emergence of new variants, it’s really kind of a race between getting vaccines in people’s arms and looking at these changes in the virus and understanding what those changes mean for the vaccine’s effectiveness. Through this, we’re going to be putting something in place so that we’re able to monitor that better. We’re looking for cases, for example, of reinfection, people who may have gotten sick last year and who are now coming down with COVID again and we’re really interested in those particular viruses, as well as individuals who have been vaccinated or are under vaccinated. Say they only received one dose of the Pfizer vaccine and then now are sick with COVID. Those are particular instances that we’re looking for so having this close network of collaborators is going to hopefully allow us to get that information, identify those cases, dovetail with our partners at the state and local and national health departments, and then make sure that those are prioritized to be able to look at that virus and understand what’s happening.
So how far in that process are you guys right now?
AZARIAN: There’s really, it’s kind of an expedited timeline to get a lot of this in place. We have a lot of these collaborations already. For example, agreements with our local health care facilities to allow us to get samples and information and get those data to our partners in public health. And what we’re really trying to do is very quickly expand on that, see what other health care facilities we can get in there, engage our partners and K-12 education, as well as, for example, something that’s important to Florida, tourism and hospitality. How we can work with them to assess their needs and see how we can better facilitate either testing or surveillance of those viruses in those settings. It’s really a kind of all hands on deck, try to get this together as quickly as possible to solidify those connections.
I know you’re trying to get together quickly, but what’s a timeframe that you guys?
AZARIAN: This award is basically to take us through a year of getting these positions in place. The Rockefeller’s Global Initiative is to identify emerging epidemics within 100 days and be able to mount a response to them and that’s kind of our goal here. Florida, for example, in the southeast of the United States has a history of kind of being the focal point of these emerging epidemics, whether that had been West Nile virus in the early 2000s or more recently Zika virus, now the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the future. Whatever the future holds, we want to make sure that this is in place to be able to continue surveillance for those emerging incidents and be able to detect them early and then respond.
Is this something that’s a first of its kind, kind of situation? Because we’ve had others that were not as big as COVID, at least in the recent past couple decades, but this is something that’s different than anything else that’s going on in years?
AZARIAN: Well, I would say that pandemic planning, especially in regards to our response to novel influenza, has been around for decades. So those plans and those collaborations were put in place in the early 2000s as we were thinking about what the next pandemic would be. A lot of these connections were already there. I think what we realized is that when we had this really compressed timeline of really trying to speed up and develop testing and trying to see how we can deploy that testing to a wider variety of locations and engage people who don’t normally do testing in their routine activities is where we realized that there were some missing pieces to that planning. I think that’s where a lot of the engagement comes with academics and research institutions, both globally and locally. However, it’s not like we’re starting from scratch. A lot of those were in place with the intention of having them be part of the response to either an emerging epidemic or something as a pandemic. So those were in place. We’re just developing and building upon what we have experience through what we’ve experienced over the last almost couple of years now.
Is there any information that would be relevant currently with the Delta variant?
AZARIAN: That is something we’re currently tracking. It’s been identified in the U.S. and the southeast. Obviously, it’s a concern in terms of vaccine effectiveness. So that’s one of those instances where we want to be able to get samples from a lot of different places that normally wouldn’t be submitting them for sequencing so that we better understand the speed at which that particular variant is emerging and spreading in the community and whether it’s impacting people differently. For example, in making people more sick or impacting or affecting younger children, for example, that may be more susceptible. In which, in those cases, that’s very different from how the virus was behaving before. That’s one particular variant of that one we know. Then our goal is to be able to continue that surveillance so we’re able to detect whatever the next one may be as this virus continues to change over the months and years to come.
And this wouldn’t be just relevant to COVID, but the possible, the next?
AZARIAN: Correct. I mean, we try to make these plans just like we made the pandemic flu plans as agnostic as possible. Once we have this infrastructure in place and really these collaboration is kind of solidified, it will really be paying dividends in the future in terms of our response to anything emerging in the years to come.
Anything that I didn’t ask you that you feel that people should know?
AZARIAN: I think that it’s really a testament to a lot of the investment that, for example, UCF has made in biomedical sciences in the last couple of years and really expanding our capacities for a genomics and bioinformatics and, again, Florida being this hub for this type of infectious disease research and activity and that is kind of paying off in terms of our ability to participate and take a large leading role in this initiative from Rockefeller.
Interview conducted by Ivanhoe Broadcast News.
END OF INTERVIEW
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