A new vaccine has been developed that could protect against a series of coronaviruses with the potential to cause future disease outbreaks, including unknown ones, the University of Cambridge, in the United Kingdom, revealed this Monday.
In a statement, the university states that this is a new, proactive approach to the development of vaccines, which are created before the pathogen causing the disease even emerges, stating that the vaccine in question has already been tested on mice.
The serum from the new vaccine trains the immune system to recognize specific areas 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 on many related coronaviruses.”allowing you to equally protect “against other coronaviruses not represented in the vaccine – including those who have not yet been identified”.
For example, the new vaccine does not include the coronavirus SARS-CoV-1, which caused the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2003, but induces an immune response against this virus.
Nanoparticles as cages
The new vaccine is of the type “nanocages quartet”, relying on nanoparticles – balls of proteins held together by strong interactions. Chains of different viral antigens are attached to these nanoparticles using a new “protein superglue”, allowing the immune system to be trained to target specific areas shared by a number of coronaviruses.
These nanocages are a new approach to nanomedicine. 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 begins.”said Rory Hills, researcher at the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Cambridge and lead author of the study, whose results are published this Monday in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.
Mark Howart, professor in the same department and coordinator of the work, pointed out that scientists do not need “wait for new coronaviruses to emerge”because enough is known about them, as well as the different immune responses, so that they can “start building protective vaccines against still unknown coronaviruses”.
“Scientists did an excellent job of quickly producing an extremely effective vaccine against Covid-19 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 at the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford (United Kingdom) and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), in the United States.
Last month, the University of California at Riverside 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 those with the system. 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. This 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.
