With new variants and subvariants of COVID evolving faster and faster, reducing the effectiveness of primary vaccines, the search for a new type of vaccine is underway, which works equally well in the existing and long-term bureaucracy of the novel coronavirus.
Now, researchers at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland have discovered a new technique for designing vaccines that could lead to a lasting blow. As a bonus, it could also apply to other coronaviruses, not just the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19.
The NIH team reported their findings in a peer-reviewed paper published in the journal Cell Host.
Key to the prospective design of the NIH vaccine is a component of the virus called the “spinal helix. “It’s a spiral-shaped design inside the spike protein, the component of the virus that helps it attach to and infect our cells.
Many existing vaccines target the spike protein. But none of them in particular target the spinal helix. And yet, there are smart reasons to focus on this component of the pathogen. While many regions of the spike protein tend to replace as much as the virus mutates, the helix of the spine is not replaced.
This gives scientists “hope that an antibody in this region will be more durable and widely effective,” Joshua Tan, principal scientist on the NIH team, told The Daily Beast.
Vaccines that target and “bind,” for example, the region of the spike protein receptor binding domain may lose their effectiveness if the virus evolves in that region. The wonderful thing about the spinal helix, from an immunological point of view, is that it mutates. At least it hasn’t mutated yet, 3 years after the COVID pandemic.
Therefore, a vaccine that binds to the spinal helix in SARS-CoV-2 lasts a long time. And it also affects all the other coronaviruses that also come with the spinal helix, and there are dozens, adding several like SARS-CoV-1. and MERS, which have already jumped from animal populations and caused outbreaks in humans.
To verify their hypothesis, NIH researchers extracted antibodies from 19 recovering COVID patients and checked them on samples of five other coronaviruses, adding SARS-CoV-2, SARS-CoV-1, and MERS. Of the other 55 antibodies, the maximum targets portions of the virus that have a tendency to mutate a lot. Only 11 pointed to the spinal helix.
But the 11 who went after the spinal helix performed better, on average, in 4 of the coronaviruses. (A fifth virus, HCoV-NL63, ignored all antibodies. ) The NIH team remotely controlled the vertebral helix antibody, COV89-22, and also tested it in inflamed hamsters with the newer subvariants of the Omicron variant of COVID. “Hamsters treated with COV89-22 showed a reduced pathology score,” the team found.
The effects are promising. ” These findings identify an elegance of. . . antibodies that largely neutralize [coronaviruses] through the stem helix,” the researchers wrote.
Don’t sabotage the champagne yet. ” While that information is useful for vaccine design, we did not conduct any vaccination experiments in this study and cannot draw any conclusions from the company regarding the efficacy of stem helix vaccines,” the NIH team said. .
It’s one thing to test some antibodies in hamsters. Another is to develop, test and get approved for an entirely new variety of vaccines. “It’s hard, ultimate things that start when clever concepts fail for one reason or another,” James Lawler, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, told The Daily Beast.
And while spinal helix antibodies appear to be largely effective, it’s not clear how they compare to faster antibodies. In other words, a spinal helix injection might be different than many other similar viruses, but it would be less effective. Well opposite to any virus than a particular prick designed for that virus. “They want to do more experiments to test whether they will be protective enough in humans,” Tan said of spinal helix antibodies.
There are many things to do before a spinal helix vaccine is available at your local pharmacy. And there are many things that can also derail these things. Additional studies may also contradict the NIH team’s findings. The new vaccine design would possibly not work as well in humans as it does in hamsters.
The new puncture may also prove dangerous, impractical to produce or too expensive for large-scale distribution. expensive to guarantee a primary investment. The main problem, he said, is that the spine’s anti-helix antibodies are less potent and “difficult to induce” from their parental B cells.
The pharmaceutical industry has to work to produce a vaccine, and the more it has to package the vaccine into a single dose to compensate for the lower potency, the less successful a vaccine becomes for mass production.
Maybe a spinal helix jab is in our future. Or maybe not. Still, it’s encouraging that scientists are moving toward a more universal coronavirus vaccine. One that can work for many years on a wide variety of similar viruses.
COVID for one is not going anywhere. And with the mutation, you risk becoming unrecognizable through existing vaccines. What we want is a mutation-resistant vaccine.