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How a Pfizer lab stays ahead of COVID-19 variants
Where and how the science happens...
https://www.statnews.com/2021/08/30/inside-pfizer-labs-variant-hunters-race-to-stay-ahead-of-pandemic-2/
. . .
STAT was granted a rare look inside Pfizer’s Pearl River research center, which has remained a place of frenetic activity for its 900 workers through the pandemic. The long, squat red brick buildings have operated as a laboratory for more than a century and played a role in past international emergencies, producing penicillin and typhus vaccines in World War II and the major oral polio vaccine in the ’60s. The site is now adapting to the current crisis, as unprecedented numbers of patient specimens crowd its loading bays. Inside the white, fluorescent-lit corridors, Pfizer built a high-security laboratory with enough safety protocols and air locks to create copies of the variants and contain SARS-2.
. . .
Isolating and transporting each particular variant from around the world is too much of a hassle. Instead, Pfizer scientists grow the variants themselves, using information from a database called GISAID, which contains virus sequencing data uploaded by scientists and physicians worldwide. . . . To create a new variant, its scientists insert the new spike protein into the old SARS-2 virus.
“Our system is very different from a lot of other labs, and I think we’re the only one in the world doing it this way,” said Pei-Yong Shi, a molecular biology professor at the University of Texas Medical Branch who’s working closely with Pfizer to study the variants.
. . .
Once the spike is generated, the virus is grown, and the neutralization assays have developed, the final stage is to analyze the results. Tompkins, the “graphing unicorn,” has this job. “I get late-night raw data and then, magically in the morning, they have beautiful graphs to interpret,” she said. Shi often sends her data late in the evening at 10 p.m. or sometimes even 1 a.m.
The updates are exhausting but exhilarating, said Tompkins. “Every time I get that clinical data, it’s a thrill just to see how awesome our vaccine is,” she said. “It’s mind-blowing.”
The variants are so far neutralized by the vaccine, but Pfizer is working on an updated vaccine to prepare for the day when one could be needed. It picked Beta, the variant with the greatest reduction in virus neutralization in the assay, as the prototype.
“We did not believe we would need a Beta variant vaccine. We did it explicitly as a test case to smooth the pathway in case we do need to do it,” said Dormitzer.
STAT was granted a rare look inside Pfizer’s Pearl River research center, which has remained a place of frenetic activity for its 900 workers through the pandemic. The long, squat red brick buildings have operated as a laboratory for more than a century and played a role in past international emergencies, producing penicillin and typhus vaccines in World War II and the major oral polio vaccine in the ’60s. The site is now adapting to the current crisis, as unprecedented numbers of patient specimens crowd its loading bays. Inside the white, fluorescent-lit corridors, Pfizer built a high-security laboratory with enough safety protocols and air locks to create copies of the variants and contain SARS-2.
. . .
Isolating and transporting each particular variant from around the world is too much of a hassle. Instead, Pfizer scientists grow the variants themselves, using information from a database called GISAID, which contains virus sequencing data uploaded by scientists and physicians worldwide. . . . To create a new variant, its scientists insert the new spike protein into the old SARS-2 virus.
“Our system is very different from a lot of other labs, and I think we’re the only one in the world doing it this way,” said Pei-Yong Shi, a molecular biology professor at the University of Texas Medical Branch who’s working closely with Pfizer to study the variants.
. . .
Once the spike is generated, the virus is grown, and the neutralization assays have developed, the final stage is to analyze the results. Tompkins, the “graphing unicorn,” has this job. “I get late-night raw data and then, magically in the morning, they have beautiful graphs to interpret,” she said. Shi often sends her data late in the evening at 10 p.m. or sometimes even 1 a.m.
The updates are exhausting but exhilarating, said Tompkins. “Every time I get that clinical data, it’s a thrill just to see how awesome our vaccine is,” she said. “It’s mind-blowing.”
The variants are so far neutralized by the vaccine, but Pfizer is working on an updated vaccine to prepare for the day when one could be needed. It picked Beta, the variant with the greatest reduction in virus neutralization in the assay, as the prototype.
“We did not believe we would need a Beta variant vaccine. We did it explicitly as a test case to smooth the pathway in case we do need to do it,” said Dormitzer.
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