This is an example that says a lot: at the Montpellier University Hospital (Hérault) where he works, sequencing platforms have just been used to track down variants.
A geneticist, president of the French Society for Predictive and Personalized Medicine (SFMPP), Pascal Pujol affirms it: France has the capacity to monitor mutations in the virus, but uses them poorly.
Faced with this major issue, he calls for more political will.
Do we now have the means to monitor the evolution of variants?
Prof. PASCAL PUJOL
.
Technically, yes.
The genome of the virus is 100,000 times smaller than the human genome.
We have the machines, the expertise and the brainpower to be able to do it.
However, all these tools are not or badly used.
There are too many partitions between specialists, too many barriers between the public and the private sector, underutilized even though they have considerable resources.
The resources are there, but the political will is lacking.
The authorities should say, "You guys are very nice each in your corner, but now you are all going to work together.
»Deploying this sacred union is also their responsibility.
Faced with such a public health issue, we have no other choice.
Why ?
Because we look through the small end of the telescope when we could see big.
Already in the spring, I feared that the absence of a real scientific watch would make us miss a variation.
Unlike the English or the Americans who sequence a lot, we have underestimated the virus's ability to mutate and the resources to be allocated.
However, this is the source of three concerns: increased contagiousness, as shown by the British, South African or Brazilian clones.
A risk of poorer immunity induced by vaccines.
An increase in severity, which cannot be excluded and would be another health disaster.
VIDEO. How this laboratory manages to detect the English variant of Covid-19
But today, this hunt is organized ...
And so much the better, but for lack of pooling of resources, we still wait five to six days to find out if a given sample carries a variant!
Another point, it is one thing to make the diagnosis, it is another to correctly monitor a new appearance of a more contagious and more serious strain.
You have to be on the lookout and not just focus on the already known variants.
Otherwise, the risk is of being surprised, of not being able to act quickly in the event of a new emergence and of not succeeding in adapting the vaccines.
The two battles must be fought head-on.
To do this, we must use all existing platforms, including those of manufacturers who have large sequencing capacities.
It is also probably more profitable and efficient than buying massive amounts of other machines.
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Why do you think this “lack of will”?
For viruses, we have exactly the same delay as for the sequencing of the human genome.
Even if the Médecine France genomique plan is being put in place, we are far from the production of other countries.
There again, England carried out more than 100,000 analyzes, us a few thousand.
It is, however, a revolution to better understand rare diseases and cancers, and to be better treated by specific treatments.
France has not taken the measure of what sequencing could bring in medicine.
There is still time to accelerate, it is quite doable, let's go!
