Within days, a laboratory at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha developed its own diagnostic test for Andes virus in anticipation of receiving the 16 American passengers from the ship.
“I believe we may be the only laboratory in the country at this time that has this test available,” Peter Ewen, director of the Nebraska Public Health Laboratory, told WIRED, referring to the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test. Its ability to detect small amounts of virus before patients develop full symptoms is critical to quickly identifying cases, getting patients prompt medical treatment, and preventing the spread of the disease.
The university’s medical center is home to a highly specialized biocontainment unit designed to care for patients with serious infectious diseases that lack vaccines or treatments. Staff members previously treated patients during the 2014 Ebola outbreak and cared for some of the first Americans to contract COVID in 2020.
When Nebraska was informed it would be receiving few travelers, Ewen contacted the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to see if it had tests available. They learned that the CDC has the ability to run a serological test, which detects the presence of hantavirus antibodies. But people don’t develop antibodies until they are actively sick and their bodies have had time to develop 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 Andes virus but that it is a research test that cannot be used for patient management. Research tests are used in scientific experiments, while clinical tests that are meant to confirm or rule out a disease in patients need to be rigorously tested or validated to ensure that they are able to produce consistent results. Nixon said the agency is working on validating its PCR test.
Ewen’s lab moved quickly to track down the materials needed to create and validate the PCR test from scratch. They called a lab in California – a state that has seen hantavirus cases before – but their test was for a specific strain found in the US. Andes virus has previously been found only in South America and has not been found in rodents native to the Americas.
“The tests we have available in the U.S. will not be able to detect the virus that is found in South America,” he says, adding that the Andes virus is genetically very different from the primary hantavirus strain found in the U.S., known as Sin Nombre virus.
The Nebraska team reached out to hantavirus scientist Steven Bradfoot of the University of New Mexico. Frannie Twohig, a graduate student in Bradfoot’s laboratory, developed the Andes virus PCR test for research purposes as part of her PhD work. Bradfoot’s laboratory also has the genetic material of the Andes virus not capable of causing disease that the Nebraska laboratory will need to validate its test.
On Friday, Bradfoot shipped a box of genetic material and chemical reagents needed to detect the virus in blood samples to Nebraska overnight. By Saturday morning, Ewen’s team had everything they needed to assemble and verify their test.
Ewen says this was enough to run about 300 tests, which took all day on Saturday and Sunday. His team added Andes genetic material at various concentrations to healthy human blood samples to see if their test could detect it. Then, they compared the results to control samples. The team used about a third of its tests on the validation process and now has the capacity to run a few hundred tests on patient samples.
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