Trust-funded research into CF lung infection helps understand COVID treatments
In research published this week in the prestigious scientific journal ‘Nature’, scientists led by Dr Chris Ruis from the CF Innovation Hub at the University of Cambridge have revealed important new information about a medicine used to treat COVID-19 infection. The researchers showed that in some cases, the antiviral drug molnupiravir doesn’t kill all of the COVID-19 viruses in the body, and some viruses mutated by the drug can spread. This research will be used to assess the benefits of molnupiravir and similar drugs as researchers continue to look for COVID-19 treatments in the future.
The methods used in this COVID-19 research study were first developed in Cystic Fibrosis Trust-funded research at the CF Innovation Hub to investigate how the CF infection-causing bacteria Mycobacterium abscessus (M. abscessus) is transmitted.
Researchers can learn about how bugs are spread and how they cause infection by studying their DNA. Each time a bug is exposed to a new local environment or stress, it leaves a trail of DNA changes (mutations). This happens in viruses such as COVID-19 or bacteria such as M. abscessus. The mutations that occur in each new environment can be unique and these changes are known as a ‘genetic signature’.
In 2021 the team at Cambridge University analysed the genetic signatures of M. abscessus variants to understand how they first started to cause infection and how these infection-causing variants travelled around the world.
In the research study published this week a worldwide group of scientists have now used a similar technique to look at COVID variants. They did this by picking apart the variants’ genetic signatures to find out what part of the virus “family tree” these mutations come from. They spotted that a genetic signature in some of the COVID-19 strains was the same as the genetic signature caused by treatment with the medicine molnupiravir.
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During the pandemic I started working two days a week analysing genomes of the COVID-19 virus and the rest of my time continuing my M. abscessus work” explained Dr Ruis from the Department of Medicine at the University of Cambridge. “COVID-19 remains an important health problem for people with underlying health conditions. Our findings about molnupiravir mutations are important to take into account when assessing the overall benefits and risks of this and similar medicines.”
We’re proud to see that our investment in the CF Innovation Hub at the University of Cambridge is continuing to accelerate progress in finding out how bacteria and viruses spread, both in people with CF, and in the general population.
Dr Lucy Allen, Director of Research and Healthcare Data at Cystic Fibrosis Trust