Within a few days, a laboratory at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha developed its own diagnostic test for the Andean virus, in anticipation of receiving 16 American passengers from the ship.
“I think we may be the only lab in the country that has this test right now,” Peter Ewen, director of the Nebraska Public Health Laboratory, tells WIRED, referring to the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test, which has been important during the COVID-19 pandemic. Its ability to detect small amounts of the virus before patients have full symptoms makes it essential to quickly identify cases, get patients immediate medical treatment, and prevent the spread of the disease.
The university’s medical center is home to a highly specialized biocontainment unit designed to care for patients with severe infectious diseases that lack vaccines or treatments. Staff previously treated patients during the Ebola outbreak in 2014 and cared for some of the first Americans diagnosed with COVID in 2020.
When Nebraska was notified it would be receiving some passengers, Ewen contacted the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to see if they had tests available. It was learned that the CDC has the ability to conduct a serological test that looks for the presence of antibodies to the Hanta virus. But people develop antibodies only after they are actively sick and their bodies have had time to mount an immune response.
Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, told WIRED that the CDC has a PCR test for Andean virus but it is a research test that cannot be used to manage patients. Research tests are used in scientific experiments, while diagnostic tests intended to confirm or rule out disease in patients need to be rigorously tested or validated to ensure they can produce consistent results. Nixon said the agency is working to validate its PCR test.
Ewen’s lab was quickly mobilized to track down the materials needed to build and validate a PCR test from scratch. They contacted a lab in California – a state that has previously seen cases of Hantavirus – but their test was for a specific strain found in the United States. Andes virus was previously discovered only in South America and has not been found in rodents native to the United States.
“The tests we have in the United States will not detect this virus found in South America,” he says, noting that the Andean virus is genetically very different from the primary Hantavirus strain found in the United States, known as the Sin Nombre virus.
The Nebraska team reached out to Steven Bradfoot, a hantavirus scientist at the University of New Mexico. Frannie Twohig, a graduate student in Bradfoot’s lab, developed a PCR test for Andean virus for research purposes as part of her doctoral work. Bradfoot’s lab also contains Andean virus genetic material that is unable to cause disease, which the Nebraska lab will need to validate its test.
On Friday, Bradfoot shipped the genetic material and a box of chemical reagents needed to detect the virus in blood samples overnight to Nebraska. By Saturday morning, Ewen’s team had what it needed to start assembling and validating the test.
Ewen says that was enough to run about 300 tests, which took all of Saturday and Sunday. His team added Andean genetic material in different concentrations to samples of healthy human blood to see if their test could detect it. They then compared the results to control samples. The team has used about a third of its tests in validation and now has the capacity to run a few hundred tests on patient samples.
