Physics Today
April 1, 2021
Physics continues to be vital in the search for new antibodies and antivirals to fight the coronavirus. The powerful one-two combination of the world’s high-performance computers sifting through hundreds of thousands of existing compounds and billions of potential ones and the world’s battery of synchrotrons, neutron sources, and cryoelectron microscopes are providing new leads for neutralizing SARS-CoV-2.
But the inexorable mutations of the coronavirus threaten to block, or at least render less effective, the vaccines that are gaining widespread usage. Already, research is showing that the antibodies produced by the Pfizer–BioNTech and AstraZeneca vaccines are far less effective against the variant originating in South Africa than against earlier SARS-CoV-2 strains, says Dave Stuart, who heads the biosciences program at the UK’s Diamond Light Source and is joint head of structural biology at the University of Oxford. As of early March, researchers had confirmed that the variant had broken through vaccine protection in some cases. “That is a genuine cause for concern,” he says.
Providing a more comprehensive defense against the coronavirus will require not only vaccines that may target less mutagenic proteins but also therapeutics to treat infected individuals.
“Tackling a virus requires a multipronged approach in the big-picture way of not only having an arsenal to respond with as the virus changes over time, but also recognizing that trying to kill something that’s not really alive is a very hard task,” says Marti Head of Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), who leads the molecular design project of the National Virtual Biotechnology Laboratory (NVBL). That consortium of nine national laboratories was formed last year by the Department of Energy to focus on COVID-19 research with funding from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. (See “Q&A: DOE’s Chris Fall,” Physics Today online, 28 April 2020.)
