Virologists at KU Leuven have selected a candidate vaccine against the coronavirus for clinical trials. This vaccine protects hamsters against Covid-19, the university announced on Thursday.
Researchers from the Rega Instituut at KU Leuven have developed a vaccine candidate that protects hamsters against SARS-CoV-2 infection. It is one of the first vaccine candidates whose efficacy has been demonstrated in laboratory animals. The team, under the direction of Professors Johan Neyts and Kai Dallmeier, started development in January of eight variants of a vaccine against the coronavirus and one of these candidate vaccines has given good results in hamsters.
After administration of the latter, the virus was indeed no longer or almost no longer detectable in the lungs of the animals. The vaccine was developed from a variant against yellow fever and could induce immunity against this disease as well as Covid-19 in laboratory animals. A piece of the genetic code for the SARS-CoV-2 virus was thus added to the yellow fever vaccine. This method has already been used successfully at Rega Instituut to produce candidate vaccines against the Ebola virus, Zika and rabies. Clinical trials will begin this winter.
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