Scientists in Australia have successfully replicated the deadly Wuhan coronavirus, in what they said would be a “game-changer” in the fight against a deadly epidemic which has stricken thousands.
The Doherty Institute in Melbourne announced Wednesday that it had grown the novel coronavirus in cell culture from a patient sample, the first time the virus has been replicated outside China.
“Having the real virus means we now have the ability to actually validate and verify all test methods, and compare their sensitivities and specificities,” virus identification laboratory head Julian Druce said.
“It will be a game-changer for diagnosis.”
China was quick to sequence the genome of the coronavirus and make it public, allowing scientists around the world to develop diagnostic tools.
However, China has not shared the virus itself with laboratories worldwide—which the Australian lab will now do via the World Health Organization—though the WHO announced Tuesday that Beijing had agreed to allow a team of international experts into the country to work with their Chinese counterparts.
Doherty Institute deputy director Mike Catton said the new finding meant scientists could now create an antibody test that would allow the coronavirus to be detected in patients who had not displayed any symptoms.
The United States said Tuesday it was developing a vaccine against the deadly virus and urged Beijing to step up its cooperation with international health authorities.
The US government is keen to place its own teams on the ground to review the raw data and learn more about the pathogen.
“We have already started at the NIH and with many of our collaborators on the developing of a vaccine,” National Institutes of Health official Anthony Fauci told reporters.
The process would take three months to start the first trial, three more months to gather data, before being able to move into its second phase, and is being undertaken by the biotech firm Moderna.
“But we are proceeding as if we will have to deploy a vaccine,” said Fauci.
“In other words, we’re looking at the worst scenario that this becomes a bigger outbreak.”
The South China Morning Post, meanwhile, reported that Hong Kong researchers have already developed a vaccine for the deadly Wuhan coronavirus—but need time to test it.
Infectious diseases expert Professor Yuen Kwok-yung told the Post his team was working on the vaccine and had isolated the previously unknown virus from the city’s first imported case.
“We have already produced the vaccine, but it will take a long time to test on animals,” Yuen said.
The United Arab Emirates announced Wednesday its first case of the new coronavirus, in a family from Wuhan, in what is thought to be the first confirmed case in the Middle East.
“The UAE Ministry of Health and Prevention announced a case of the new coronavirus affecting people from one family coming from the city of Wuhan in China,” the state news agency WAM reported, without saying how many were infected.
“The health condition of those affected was stable and under medical monitoring,” it cited the ministry as saying.
Gulf airports, including Dubai which is home to one of the world’s biggest aviation hubs, said last week they would screen all passengers arriving from China amid the outbreak of the deadly virus.
Dubai’s government said Thursday that some 989,000 Chinese tourists visited the glitzy emirate last year—a number expected to cross the one million mark in 2020.
About 3.6-million Chinese transited through the emirate’s main airport in 2019.
The UAE’s Abu Dhabi International Airport, another major hub, has also begun screening passengers arriving from China.
Between them, the two Emirati hubs operate dozens of flights a week with Chinese cities.
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