Scientists have created a vaccine to help protect against multiple coronaviruses, even ones we “don’t even know about yet,” according to its creators.
Created by experts from the universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Caltech in California, the project aims to “proactively” build a vaccine before the next potential pandemic-causing pathogen becomes a threat.
The experimental injection, which has so far only been tested in mice, works by training the immune system to recognize parts of many different coronaviruses, a family of viruses that includes Covid, SARS and MERS.
Current vaccines work by training the immune system to attack only one specific type of virus, like the measles vaccine. But the new blow can target several.
Such an injection could allow people to be protected from multiple types of coronavirus in a single dose, including, in theory, those currently unknown to science.
Vaccines typically work by using a single antigen to train the immune system to target a specific virus. But this blow can target several
The jab works using a small protein ball called a “quartet nanocage.”
The scientists then used what they called a “protein superglue” to bind antigens, which are substances that trigger an immune response in the body, allowing it to fight pathogens.
The resulting vaccine allows the immune system to recognize parts of eight coronaviruses.
This includes some that are It is currently only found in wild bats, but could theoretically infect humans in the future.
Using multiple antigens in this way allows the immune system to target parts of coronaviruses common to many individual viruses, including some that have not yet been found.
For example, tests showed that the injection helped mice fight off SARS-Cov-1, the pathogen that caused the SARS outbreak in 2003.
This is despite the fact that the vaccine does not include any samples of this virus specifically.
Rory Hills, a graduate researcher in pharmacology at the University of Cambridge’s department of pharmacology and first author of the report, said: ‘Our goal is to create a vaccine that protects us against the next coronavirus pandemic and have it ready even before the pandemic starts.’
He added: “We have created a vaccine that provides protection against a wide range of different coronaviruses, including some that we don’t even know about yet.”
Professor Mark Howarth, lead author of the study, said the results could be a springboard to making new vaccines even faster than those created during the darkest days of the Covid pandemic.
“Scientists did a great job quickly producing an extremely effective Covid vaccine during the last pandemic, but the world still had a massive crisis with a large number of deaths,” he said.
“We need to figure out how we can do even better in the future, and a powerful component of that is to start manufacturing the vaccines early.”
Publishing your results Nanotechnology from nature Scientists hope to begin clinical trials of their new vaccine in early 2025.