New vaccine may be effective against coronaviruses that have not yet emerged

Researchers have developed a new vaccine that could protect against a series of coronaviruses with the potential to cause future outbreaks of diseases, including unknown ones, revealed this Monday the University of Cambridgein the United Kingdom.

In a statement, the university said that this is a new, proactive approach to the development of vaccines, which are created even before the pathogen causing the disease emerges, stating that the vaccine in question has already been tested on rats.

The new vaccine’s serum trains the immune system to recognize specific zones of eight different coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2 (which causes Covid-19) and others currently circulating in bats with the potential to pass to humans and cause a pandemic.

“The key to its effectiveness is that the specific areas of the virus that the vaccine targets also appear in many related coronaviruses”, allowing it to equally protect “against other coronaviruses not represented in the vaccine – including those that have not yet been identified”.

For example, the new vaccine does not include the SARS-CoV-1 coronavirus, which caused the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak in 2003, but induces an immune response to this virus.

The new “‘Quartet Nanocage’ vaccine is based on a structure called a nanoparticle – a ball of proteins held together by strong interactions. Chains of different viral antigens are linked to this nanoparticle using a new ‘protein superglue'”, allowing the system to immune system is trained to target specific areas shared by a number of coronaviruses.

The underlying technology also has potential for use in the development of other vaccines.

“Our goal is to create a vaccine that protects us against the next coronavirus pandemic and have it ready before the pandemic starts,” said Rory Hills, a researcher in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Cambridge and lead author of the study, whose results are published today in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

There is no need to “wait for a new coronavirus to emerge”

Mark Howart, professor in the same department and coordinator of the work, pointed out that scientists do not need to “wait for new coronaviruses to emerge”, because enough is known about them, as well as about different immunological responses, so that they can “start to build protective vaccines against still unknown coronaviruses”.

“Scientists did an excellent job of quickly producing an extremely effective Covid-19 vaccine during the last pandemic, but the world still had a huge crisis with a huge number of deaths. We need to figure out how we can do even better in the future and starting to build vaccines early is an important element.”

The work is the result of collaboration between scientists from the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford (United Kingdom) and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), United States.

Last month, the University of California – Riverside (UCR), in the United States, indicated in a statement that researchers at the institution revealed a new strategy for an RNA-based vaccine, which is effective against any strain of a virus and safe even for babies. and for those who have a weakened immune system.

This vaccine targets a part of the viral genome that is common to all strains of a virus and will eliminate the need to create different vaccines depending on the variants.

The vaccine, how it works and a demonstration of its effectiveness in mice were described in an article published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.