Disrupters

ILLUMINA

Decoding COVID-19

By Alice Park

IN NOVEMBER 2019, FRANCIS DESOUZA, PRESIDENT and CEO of California-based Illumina, learned from his client-support team based in China that something big in the infectious-disease world might be brewing. Health authorities in Wuhan were seeing cases of a mysterious pneumonia-like illness, and were starting to genetically sequence samples to figure out what they were dealing with—and “scoping out some equipment they needed” to do it at the scale and speed they needed, says deSouza. They turned to Illumina, which makes sequencing machines that can spit out the genetic code of any living thing in hours. In this case, they were hoping that the genetic information would reveal whether the culprit was a known pathogen or something entirely new.

While the orders were being arranged, to speed things along, samples from the first patients in Wuhan were sent to the lab of Zhang Yongzhen at Fudan University in Shanghai. Zhang, an experienced virologist, had in his lab an Illumina NovaSeq, a copier-size machine that is the company’s most powerful workhorse for decoding genomes quickly and accurately. On Jan. 10, his team outed the virus behind COVID-19, posting its entire genome, the equivalent of its fingerprint, on a public genetics database so researchers around the world could use it to develop new drugs and vaccines.

The two months or so from when those first cases appeared to the revelation of the genetic sequence of the virus, SARS-CoV-2, were lightning fast in the scientific world. (It took 13 years to map the human genome; the first draft was completed in 2001.) With the COVID-19 virus’s sequence in hand, scientists at Massachusetts-based biotech Moderna, also relying on Illumina equipment, developed a vaccine to fight the virus in record time—25 days—and were ready to test the shot in people in 63 days, another speed record. BioNTech in Germany wasn’t far behind, and after partnering with U.S. pharmaceutical company Pfizer, it became the first to earn authorization in the U.S. to start vaccinating people—less than a year after Zhang published the virus’s genome.

DeSouza says such a pace, fueled by genetic sequencing, should become routine rather than the exception. The pandemic is providing a stage for demonstrating what such sequencing