BA.2.86 New Coronavirus Variant: Risks & Precautions

Remember this name: BA.2.86, also known as Pirola. It's a new variant of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that could become a hot topic in the upcoming months or might be forgotten soon. Scientists have marked it for "special surveillance" due to its high number of mutations that could possibly dodge the immune defenses set up by previous infections and vaccines. It's already been identified across four continents.

Currently, only a handful of coronavirus samples have been linked back to the BA.2.86 variant. The cause for concern lies in the high number of mutations this version of SARS-CoV-2 has undergone, especially in the spike protein area. This is the part of the virus that attaches to cells and the part that vaccines train our bodies to recognize. This new variant seems to have descended from an Omicron subvariant, BA.2. Unlike other offspring variants that only gained a few critical mutations, BA.2.86 has 34 extra mutations in the spike region compared to BA.2.

Playing Hide-and-Seek

Jesse Bloom, a virologist and computational biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, suggests that many of these mutations are located in the spike areas typically targeted by neutralizing antibodies. These antibodies have the ability to inactivate the virus, making it ineffective. This implies that the BA.2.86 variant might be capable of bypassing some of the defenses that most of the world's population currently has due to vaccines and previous infections.

The BA.2.86 variant's distinctiveness from existing widespread variants is akin to the initial emergence of Omicron, keeping epidemiologists moderately alert. Such heavily mutated genetic profiles of coronavirus have been recorded in patients with long-term SARS-CoV-2 infections, and it's probable that this new variant originated from an immunocompromised patient with a chronic infection.

The global spread of BA.2.86, identified in countries including Denmark, the UK, the US, Israel, South Africa, Switzerland, and Thailand, suggests that this form of COVID could already be spreading within communities. However, the full extent is yet to be determined. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there has not been a significant increase in hospitalizations in areas where BA.2.86 has been detected, suggesting that the severity of the disease hasn't increased.

Furthermore, unlike the initial stages of the Omicron era, most people are now armed with some level of immune defense against the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. Hence, even if the new variant could evade neutralizing antibodies, it would still have to contend with other secondary immune defenses that could potentially lessen the severity of the infection. The transmission efficiency of BA.2.86, another key factor for a global infection wave, is currently unknown.

The Vaccine Conundrum

The upcoming fall anti-COVID vaccine campaign includes boosters based on the genetic sequence of the spike of the XBB.1.5 variant (the so-called "Kraken" variant, also from Omicron), which closely resembles all other circulating variants. It remains to be seen if this booster will also be effective against BA.2.86. Given the high number of mutations in the new lineage, there's a chance that if BA.2.86 were to spread, the boosters might need to be updated as well.