Breaking the wave: What will it take for us to get ahead of COVID-19? | angus_dalton
. But experts say it isn’t feasible to create altered vaccines for every new variant.
“So far we’ve got a number of antibodies that bind to a huge selection of coronaviruses,” says Dooley. “So it does look like this vaccine is, at least in our animals, raising antibodies that might be able to protect against the other variants, and maybe future variants.” Until one of these “pan-variant” vaccines are widely available we’ll be “chasing the virus” as it mutates, says Professor Nicholas Wood, senior staff specialist at the National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance .
“All of the sub-variants now that we’re getting with Omicron are coming along so quickly,” she says from her office at the Charles Perkins centre at the University of Sydney. “Having to re-engineer a vaccine every time a new variant comes along is very challenging. And by the time you’ve done that the next wave is coming from a different variant.
Once a spike protein is identified the project will use the “protein-subunit” method to make a vaccine. DNA that codes for the spike protein is inserted into a carrier molecule called a “plasmid”. The molecule delivers the DNA into mammalian cells, which are used as a factory to produce the spike proteins. The proteins are collected, purified, and combined with an adjuvant - a substance that triggers an immune response - to create the resulting vaccine.
“It’s just hard to get a response that’s sufficient to stop the virus getting in and infecting people,” says University of Queensland infectious diseases physician Dr Paul Griffin. A nasal vaccine called FluMist is already used in the US as an alternative to influenza shots. And he says there’s “lots to be excited by” in the pipeline.
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