Inside the Race to Develop Tests for Rare Andean Hantavirus

When the passengers return to the US from a cruise that saw a rare hantavirus infectionMuch of the world lacks an important public health tool: early diagnosis. Nebraska may be the first state to have such a capability.

Within days, a lab at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha developed its own test for Andes virus in anticipation of receiving 16 American passengers from the ship.

“I believe we’re probably the only lab in the country that has this test right now,” Peter Iwen, director of the Nebraska Public Health Laboratory told WIRED, referring to the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test, which was needed in the Covid-19 outbreak. Its ability to detect small amounts of the virus before patients develop obvious symptoms makes it important to diagnose the disease quickly, find patients. emergency medical careand prevent the spread of disease.

The university hospital has a special unit to care for patients with highly contagious diseases that have no vaccine or treatment. Workers previously treated patients during the 2014 Ebola outbreak and cared for some of the first people in America to be diagnosed with Covid in 2020.

When Nebraska was notified that it would receive some of the passengers, Iwen contacted the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to see if it had a test. She learned that the CDC can conduct serological tests, which look for the presence of antibodies to hantavirus. But people don’t develop antibodies until they are very sick and their body has had time to develop an immune system.

Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the United States Department of Health and Human Services, told WIRED that the CDC has a PCR test for Andes virus but it is a diagnostic test that cannot be used to monitor patients. Research tests are used in scientific research, when diagnostic tests that are supposed to confirm or rule out disease in patients must be rigorously tested, or confirmed, to ensure that they have stable results. Nixon said the agency is working to validate its PCR test.

Iwen’s lab quickly assembled to research the necessary equipment to develop and validate PCR tests from scratch. They called in a lab in California – a state that has previously seen cases of hantavirus – but their tests were of a different type available in the US. Andes virus was previously only found in South America and is not found in rodents living in the US.

“The tests we have in the US will not detect the virus that is found in South America,” he says, noting that the Andes virus is very different from the first type of hantavirus found in the US, called the Sin Nombre virus.

The Nebraska team reached out to Steven Bradfute, a hantavirus scientist at the University of New Mexico. Frannie Twohig, a graduate student in Bradfute’s lab, developed the Andes virus PCR test for research as part of her PhD project. Bradfute’s lab also has the genetic material of the Andes virus that cannot cause the disease that the Nebraska lab would need to confirm its tests.

On Friday, Bradfute shipped the genetics and a box of drugs needed to detect the virus in blood samples overnight to Nebraska. By Saturday morning, Iwen’s team had what it needed to begin collecting and validating its tests.

It was enough to run about 300 tests, which took all day on Saturday and Sunday, Iwen says. His team added Andes genetics in different groups to healthy human blood samples to see if their test could detect them. Then, they compared the results to control samples. The group used about a third of its tests on the approved protocol and now has the capacity to perform several hundred tests on patient samples.