Coronavirus: scientists develop a new vaccine that would be effective even for the next COVID-19 pandemic

Four years after a coronavirus cause a global emergency, scientists have already developed a new vaccine technology that they have shown in mice to protect against a wide range of coronaviruses with the potential for future outbreaks of the disease, including some that we don’t even know about yet.

This is a new approach, called “proactive vaccinology,” in which scientists create a vaccine even before the pathogen causing the disease appears.

The new vaccine trains the body’s immune system to recognize specific regions of eight different coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-1, SARS-CoV-2 and several that are currently circulating among bats and that could jump to humans and cause a pandemic.

The key to its effectiveness is that the specific regions of the virus targeted by the vaccine also appear in many related coronaviruses.

By training the immune system to attack these regions, it protects against other coronaviruses not represented in the vaccine, including some that have not yet been identified.

For example, the vaccine does not include the SARS-CoV-1 coronavirus, which caused the SARS outbreak in 2003, but still induces an immune response against it.

Details of the research, carried out by scientists from the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford and Caltech, were published this Monday in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

A vaccine against viruses that we do not yet know

“We have created a vaccine that provides protection against a wide range of different coronaviruses, including some that we do not yet know about,” says Rory Hills, a researcher at the University of Cambridge and first author of the study.

“We don’t have to wait for new coronaviruses to emerge. We know enough about coronaviruses and their different immune responses to start building protective vaccines against unknown coronaviruses,” adds Mark Howarth, from the University of Cambridge and co-senior author.

The new “Quartet Nanocage” vaccine is based on a structure called a nanoparticle, a ball of proteins linked by incredibly strong interactions.

Using a novel ‘protein superglue’, chains of different viral antigens adhere to this nanoparticle, training the immune system to target specific regions shared by a wide range of coronaviruses.

This study demonstrated that the new vaccine elicits a broad immune response, even in mice pre-immunized with SARS-CoV-2.

Clinical trials by 2025

The design of the new vaccine is much simpler than other broadly protective vaccines currently in development, which researchers say should accelerate its move to clinical trials.

The underlying technology they have developed also has the potential to be used in the development of vaccines that protect against many other health problems.

This is an improvement on previous work, carried out by the Oxford and Caltech groups, to develop a novel “all-in-one” vaccine against coronavirus threats.

The vaccine developed by Oxford and Caltech should enter phase 1 clinical trials in early 2025, but its complex nature makes it difficult to manufacture, which could limit its large-scale production.