(Adds health minister comments)
By Guy Faulconbridge
LONDON, May 13 (Reuters) - British researchers will study
the genes of thousands of ill COVID-19 patients to try to crack
one of the most puzzling riddles of the novel coronavirus: why
does it kill some people but give others not even a mild
headache?
Researchers from across the United Kingdom will sequence the
genetic code of people who fell critically ill with COVID-19 and
compare their genomes with those who were mildly ill or not ill
at all.
The hunt for the specific genes that could cause a
predisposition to getting ill with COVID-19 will involve up to
20,000 people currently or previously in hospital intensive care
with COVID-19 and about 15,000 people with mild symptoms.
Scientists caution that their knowledge of the novel
coronavirus, which emerged in China last year, is still modest
though they say it is striking how it can be so deadly for some
but so mild for others.
It is, as yet, unclear why.
"We think that there will be clues in the genome that will
help us understand how the disease is killing people," Kenneth
Baillie, an intensive care doctor who is leading the study at
the University of Edinburgh, told Reuters.
"I would bet my house on there being a very strong genetic
component to individual risk," Baillie said.
Health minister Matt Hancock called on people to sign up to
the programme. "If you're asked to sign up to the genomics trial
which is being run by Genomics England, then please do, because
then we can understand the genetic links. It's all part of
building a scientific picture of this virus."
The genome is an organism's complete set of deoxyribonucleic
acid, or DNA, and in humans it contains about 3 billion DNA base
pairs.
But comparing them can be tough. There are 4 million to 5
million differences between any two people so scientists need a
big sample, Baillie said.
"We don't know at a mechanistic level, at the level of
molecules and cells, what are the events that are actually
causing people to get sick and die from this disease," he said.
Baillie will work with the intensive care units across the
United Kingdom, Genomics England and a global genetics research
consortium known as the Genetics of Susceptibility and Mortality
in Critical Care, or GenOMICC.
"By reading the whole genome we may able to identify
variation that affects response to Covid-19 and discover new
therapies that could reduce harm, save lives and even prevent
future outbreaks," said Mark Caulfield, chief scientist at
Genomics England.
Some answers could come as soon as in a few weeks from a
study of almost 2,000 people already underway, Baillie said,
though it is likely that testing more people will ensure that
the signals they detect are genuine.
The results will be shared globally.
"Your chance of dying from an infection is very strongly
encoded in your genes - much more strongly than your chances of
dying from heart disease or cancer," Baillie said.
(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge, Editing by Angus MacSwan and
Andrew Heavens)