January 2024

2024-01-09 20:16:14

A new variant of Covid-19 has been in the news since the start of the school year. Now in the majority among Covid patients, it worries the scientific community who fear that this might be the start of the development of variants responsible for more serious illnesses.

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If you thought that Covid-19, like the flu, had joined the group of seasonal diseases to watch out for, you were wrong. A new variant, JN.1, is once once more causing concern within the medical community. And for good reason: its propensity to infect certain lung cells, as well as its contagiousness might make it the most dangerous variant since the Delta variant, at the origin of the 2020 pandemic.

In France, JN.1 already represents more than half of Covid cases, and it is responsible for the largest epidemic outbreak since Omicron. Coming from the BA.2.86 variant first detected in July 2023, JN.1 shows an increased capacity to infect certain lung cells: CaLu-3. These are cells in the lower part of the lung that are lined with a surface protein called TMPRSS2. According to Shan-Lu Liu, lead author of a study published in the journal CellBA.2.86 can enter lung CaLu-3 cells better than any Covid variant since Delta.

The door open to the development of a more serious illness?

If the severity of the diseases for which it is responsible does not seem, for the moment, more significant than that of the other variants, the researcher still calls for caution, since the capacity of BA.2.86 – then of JN.1 – to infect certain lung cells is one of the main characteristics of severe variants of SARS-CoV-2.

“The question now is whether BA.2.86, as well as its descendants, including JN.1, will have an increased tendency to infect human lung epithelial cells, like the parental virus that started the pandemic in 2020estimates Shan-Lu Liu in a communiqué published on January 8. We know that coronaviruses are prone to viral recombination, which can lead to new variants with a large number of mutations that might increase immune evasion but also disease severity. » Hence the importance of carrying out vaccine boosters, the natural antibodies resulting from contamination with another variant being up to 10 times weaker than those induced by a vaccine.

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