com New variants and subvariants of COVID They evolve faster and faster, each destroying the power of the flagship vaccinesThe search for a new type of vaccine that works well on current and future forms of the new coronavirus continues.
Now, researchers at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland believe they have created a new approach to vaccine design that could lead them to a longer-acting dose. As a bonus, it can also work other coronavirusand not just the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID.
The National Institutes of Health team reported the findings in A peer-reviewed study which appeared in the magazine host cell and microbe earlier this month.
The key to the NIH’s potential vaccine project is a part of the virus called the “spinal slug.” It’s a spiral-shaped structure within the spike protein, which is part of the virus that helps it attach to and infect our cells.
Many current vaccines target the spike protein. But none of them specifically target spiny slugs. However, there are good reasons to focus on this part of the pathogen. While many regions of the spike protein tend to change a lot as the virus mutates, so does the snail’s backbone. No.
This gives scientists “hope that an antibody that targets this region would be more durable and broadly effective,” Joshua Tan, lead scientist on the NIH team, told The Daily Beast.
Vaccines that target and “bind,” for example, to the receptor binding domain region of the spike protein may lose efficacy if the virus grows in that region. The beauty of spiny snails, immunologically, is that they don’t mutate. At least it hasn’t changed YetThree years of the COVID pandemic.
Therefore, a vaccine that binds to snail SARS-CoV-2 should last a long time. And it should work on all the other coronaviruses too which also includes spinal snails – and there are dozens of them, including several like SARS-CoV-1 and MERS that have already increased animal numbers and caused outbreaks in humans.
To test their hypothesis, the NIH researchers extracted antibodies from 19 recovered COVID patients and tested them on samples from five different coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2, SARS-CoV-1 and MERS. Of the 55 different antibodies, most focus on parts of the virus that tend to mutate a lot. 11 only targeted the snail’s spine.
But the 11 who opted for the spinal IUD performed better, on average, on four of the coronaviruses. (A fifth virus, HCoV-NL63, rules out all antibodies.) The NIH team isolated the best coiled backbone antibody, COV89-22, and also tested it on hamsters infected with the new subvariants of the Omicron variant of COVID. The team found that ‘hamsters treated with COV89-22 had a lower disease score’.
The results are promising. These results define a class of… broadly neutralizing antibodies [coronaviruses] Aim for the snail trunk,” the researchers wrote.
The champagne hasn’t erupted yet. The NIH team cautioned that “although these data are useful for vaccine development, we did not perform vaccination trials in this study and therefore cannot draw definitive conclusions about the effectiveness of coil vaccines.”
It’s one thing to test certain antibodies in a hamster. Developing and conducting trials and getting approval for a new class of vaccine is another matter. “It’s very difficult, and most things start with good ideas that fail for one reason or another,” James Lawler, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, told The Daily Beast.
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Although it seems that the antibodies against the snail’s backbone Generally speaking effective, it is unclear how they compare to more specific antibodies. In other words, a spiral pimple shot might work against a group of different but related viruses, but it works less effectively against any one virus than an injection designed specifically for that virus. “More tests are needed to evaluate whether they will provide adequate protection in humans,” Tan said of the snail and spine antibodies.
There is much work to be done before the coil vaccine is available at Zawia Pharmacy. There are many things that can hinder this work. Additional studies may contradict the NIH team’s findings. The new vaccine design may not work as well in humans as it does in hamsters.
A new vaccine could also prove dangerous, impractical to produce, or too expensive to deploy on a large scale. Barton Haynes, an immunologist at Duke University, told The Daily Beast that he reviewed snail backbone vaccine designs last year and concluded they would be too expensive to justify a large investment. The main problem, he said, is that the spiny snail’s antibodies are less potent and “difficult to induce” than the mother’s B cells.
The harder the pharmaceutical industry has to work to produce a vaccine, and the more volume of vaccine that has to be packaged into a single dose to compensate for the lower potency, the less economical the vaccine will be to mass produce.
Maybe a spiral pimple scam is in our future. Or maybe not. Either way, it’s encouraging that scientists are making incremental progress towards this. A global vaccine for the Corona virus🇧🇷 One that could work for many years on a wide variety of related viruses.
COVID, for example, isn’t going anywhere. And with each mutation it risks becoming unrecognizable in current vaccines. What we need is a mutagenic vaccine.
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