Heroes of the Pandemic 04: Dr. Andrew McArthur - Tracking the novel coronavirus at the molecular level

When Dr. Andrew McArthur and his team started developing an innovative genomic surveillance tool in spring 2019, they were given a fortuitous head start in the eventual fight against the novel coronavirus.  

Dr. McArthur, Associate Professor, Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences, McMaster University, was focused on creating a technology to solve the problem that diagnostic tools only detect 70 per cent of respiratory viruses – leaving 30 per cent of the viruses undiagnosed and with limited treatment choices.

The unexpected pivot to fight the novel coronavirus

Fast forward to December 2019 when the early reports and the first genome sequence of the novel coronavirus were coming out of Wuhan, China.

“As soon as it became obvious that this virus was going to break out, we took everything we spent eight months designing for our respiratory virus diagnostics work and in two weeks designed a technology for this coronavirus,” said Dr. McArthur, who is also a faculty member of the Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research.

The tool uses “fish hooks” to pull the virus from samples so that genome sequencing can be done to determine how the virus is transmitting and how it is evolving.

“We want to know where the virus is spreading so that we can do contact tracing at the finest details and we also want to know if it’s mutating so we can correct the diagnostic test,” explained, Dr. McArthur.

“It is also important as the vaccine is developed that we understand how the virus has evolved which requires constant sequencing so that all that vaccine work isn’t moot. You only know that by looking at the genome.”

The future commercialization of the technology

Dr. McArthur’s focus is to do what is needed right now in this pandemic. His team is sharing their data and information online with the international community.

“As an engineer, you often can dream up something beautiful and a clinician will never touch it because it doesn’t help them,” he said. “We have new collegial relationships with our clinician colleagues and when we come back to our original problem that 30% of respiratory viruses are undiagnosed, we will have a much better sense of how to build a tool that a clinician wants.”

For Dr. McArthur, the pandemic has proven that he and his team’s technology was the right idea.