With $2.38 million in grant support from a new contract with the Louisiana Department of Health (LDH) and a National Institute of General Medical Sciences supplement, LSU Health New Orleans intends to form partnerships to sequence SARS-CoV-2 variants.
A team led by Dr. Lucio Miele, professor and chair of Genetics, as well as Assistant Dean for Translational Science at LSU Health New Orleans School of Medicine, will begin sequencing samples from breakthrough cases, reinfections, as well as cases among the unvaccinated and most vulnerable to COVID-19. LDH will handle the sampling alongside the nonprofit Ochsner through a public-private partnership, while LSU Health New Orleans will do the sequencing.
A small Louisiana bioinformatics company will also participate in the project for analytics and data interpretation. The partnership will benefit from community engagement and health literacy efforts conducted by Xavier University. The latter will focus on creating culturally sensitive educational material to explain the importance of surveillance and the dangers posed by variants.
Over the past year, Miele has already sequenced samples from patients infected with SARS-CoV-2. In the course of that, he identified as many as 28 variants circulating simultaneously, with the Alpha variant — B.1.1.7, originally found in the U.K. — now the most prevalent.