The goal of a universal vaccine would have seemed a fantasy only a few years ago. But not now…
additional vaccine booster jabs
Is that just a fantasy? Not necessarily. After all, many considered it fanciful, when the pandemic began, that we’d have a vaccine against Covid-19. But experience has proved that “we as a research community can pull together and do remarkable things,” says Larry Corey, a virologist and vaccine expert at the University of Washington in Seattle.
One answer is to adapt the vaccines to the variants. The mRNA vaccines made by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna contain RNA molecules that act as templates for our cells to make harmless fragments of the spike protein. This is the vaccine’s antigen, provoking the immune system to find antibody molecules that will recognise the viral protein and mobilise immune cells against it. Then if the actual virus gets into our bodies, our immune system is primed to identify and destroy it.
That’s all very well – except that Omicron has shown how rapidly a significantly new variant of the coronavirus can appear and spread globally. Pfizer and Moderna are now working on a. But even if this can be made and tested within a few months, that may be too late. So a universal vaccine that can protect against all variants could be preferable.
a bunch of other animal coronaviruses, then the likelihood is that the next variant of Sars-CoV-2 will have them too,” says Skip Virgin, chief scientific officer of San Francisco-based Vir Biotechnologies, which is working with GlaxoSmithKline on vaccine development – a collaboration that has already producedAt the moment, researchers are mostly striving for the relatively modest target of hitting just a subset of the coronavirus universe: typically, to stimulate an immune response against a...
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