Scientists create vaccine with potential to protect against future coronaviruses | Vaccines and immunisation

Scientists have created a vaccine that has the potential to protect against a wide range of coronaviruses, including varieties that are not even known about yet.

The experimental shot, which was tested on mice, marks a shift in strategy toward “proactive vaccinology,” in which vaccines are designed and prepared for production before a potentially pandemic virus emerges.

The vaccine is made by attaching harmless proteins from various coronaviruses to tiny nanoparticles, which are then injected to trigger the body’s defenses to fight the viruses if they ever invade.

Because the vaccine trains the immune system to target proteins that are shared among many different types of coronavirus, the protection it induces is extremely broad, making it effective against known and unknown viruses in the same family.

“We have shown that a relatively simple vaccine can still provide a diffuse response across a number of different viruses,” said Rory Hills, a graduate researcher at the University of Cambridge and first author of the report. “This takes us one step closer to our goal of creating vaccines before the pandemic has even started.”

Tests in mice showed that the vaccine elicited a broad immune response to coronaviruses, including Sars-Cov-1, the pathogen that caused the Sars outbreak in 2003, even though proteins from that virus were not added to the vaccine nanoparticles. Details of the work, a collaboration between the universities of Cambridge and Oxford and the Caltech Institute, are published in Natural nanotechnologies.

The universal coronavirus vaccine could be made in existing microbial fermentation facilities, Hills said, adding that researchers are working with industrial partners on ways to scale up the process. The nanoparticles and viral proteins can be made at different times in different places and mixed together to make the vaccine.

Medical regulators don’t have procedures for proactive vaccinology, and the researchers say they need to be developed with the relevant authorities. If the vaccine is found to be safe and effective in humans, one possibility would be to use it as a booster against Covid with the added benefit of protection against other coronaviruses.

States are more likely to hold stockpiles of the vaccine and others designed to target individual pathogens once they are manufactured and approved. “In the event that a coronavirus or other pathogen breaks through, you can have a pre-existing stockpile of vaccines ready and a clear plan to ramp up production quickly if needed,” Hills said.

Prof. Mark Howarth, senior author of the study, said: “Scientists did a great job of rapidly producing a highly effective Covid vaccine during the last pandemic, but the world still had a massive crisis with huge numbers of deaths. We have to figure out how we can do even better than that in the future, and a powerful component of that is starting to create vaccines in advance.”