Pan-coronavirus vaccines are our best bet to win this battle: How to grab them

The world is breeding new forms so rapidly, it may not make sense to chase them all at once. Global regulators don’t necessarily think this is the right approach. The World Health Organization and the US Food and Drug Administration say omicron-specific vaccines may not be needed, and public-health agencies around the world – not drug companies – work together to decide the composition of the next vaccines. needed.

A sensible strategy is one that many vaccine scientists are already working on: the development of pan-coronavirus vaccines, capable of quashing any that exist or emerge.

It’s certainly possible that the Omicron-specific vaccines that Pfizer and Moderna are working on will prove useful, Anthony Fauci told me — at least for a while. But, he added, “we have to be careful because you might be sporting some kind of weird approach as new variants.” In addition to advising President Joe Biden on the response to COVID, Fauci heads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is funding various efforts to create a pan-coronavirus vaccine.

Chances are good that a new Covid-19 variant is already lurking that may look nothing like Omicron. Virus experts have been “humbled” by the extent of this coronavirus’s mutation, says Penny Moore, a virologist at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. Changes in the spike protein – the target of our current vaccines – have jumped around from beta to delta to omicron, enough to suggest that an omicron-specific vaccine may be powerless against the next variant.

In an ideal world, the fastest way to end this type of stalking would be to immediately vaccinate the entire world with existing shots. Omicron has shown that it can break the protections of Pfizer and Moderna, but these vaccines still protect against serious illness, hospitalization, and death. For now, countries with insufficient vaccine supplies are breeding grounds for new variants.

A smart way to combat this is to manufacture and test pan-coronavirus vaccines – and to devise a plan for all countries to produce enough of them. But they cannot be made as rapidly as variant-specific vaccines. Fauci estimates that if we’re unlucky, they could take months or even years to accomplish. But given the possibility that the world will live with SARS-CoV-2 for a long time, it is necessary to try to create a universal protection against any and all forms that develop.

So what exactly is a pan-coronavirus vaccine? The term has become an important term for both vaccines that can protect against any current and future SARS-CoV-2 variants and those that can confer immunity against SARS, MERS, and any other accompanying coronaviruses. Huh. Scientists have reason to be optimistic that either type is possible. Design templates already exist for universal vaccines against flu and HIV. The trouble is, none of these designs have hit the market yet, and many have been utter failures.

However, coronaviruses can be easy targets. Their inherent error-correction mechanism causes them to mutate much more slowly than the flu virus or HIV.

So scientists in academic and government laboratories are working with a specific design that has shown promise against the flu: a nanoparticle studded with fragments of the virus thought to be important for eliciting a strong immune response.

Researchers from several laboratories, including the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, the National Institutes of Health, the California Institute of Technology, the University of Washington’s Institute of Protein Design and Northwestern University, are experimenting with different types of nanoparticles decorated with spike proteins. From different SARS-CoV-2 variants.

The idea is that exposing the immune system to a few different spike proteins would enable it to mount a defense against any it encounters. Last month, scientists at Walter Reed published data showing that their pan-coronavirus vaccine protected nonhuman primates with antibodies against not only SARS-CoV-2, but also SARS-CoV-1, the strain responsible for the 2003 SARS outbreak. inspired to produce. These researchers have begun an initial Phase 1 trial in humans to ensure that it is safe and elicits an immune response.

Another experimental pan-coronavirus vaccine created by Pamela Björkman’s lab at Caltech has room for even more spike proteins than Walter Reed’s. She is preparing to launch a trial in the UK

Another way to make a pan-coronavirus vaccine is to target parts of the virus that remain the same when mutated, perhaps a small region on the spike protein. But since so many of the virus’s mutations are on the spike, it may not be easy. Vir Biotechnology Inc., which makes the only antibody therapy still effective against Omicron, is well on its way to identifying these so-called highly conserved regions on the virus, says Herbert “Skip” Virgil, Vir’s chief scientific officer. The hope is that a vaccine targeting these locations could provide many years of widespread protection against coronaviruses.

“But discovering these vaccines will take time,” Fauci says. “It’s not going to happen tomorrow.” In creating the initial COVID vaccine, scientists were able to quickly build on years of work to build the spike protein into the proper shape for the human immune system to show. Doing this again for whatever area remains unchanged in the spike? “It can take a long time,” Fauci says.

Putting more and more effort into projects can make them go ahead faster. In September, NIAID gave $36.3 million in pan-coronavirus grants, and that’s a start. Involving the big drug firms – and their huge research budgets – would also help. It’s not too early for companies like Pfizer and Moderna to shift their focus to pan-coronavirus vaccines.

This story has been published without modification in text from a wire agency feed. Only the title has been changed.