The new vaccine may be effective against coronaviruses that have not yet emerged

The University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom today revealed that researchers have developed a new vaccine that could protect against a series of coronaviruses that have the potential to cause future disease outbreaks, including unknown diseases.
The university said in a statement that this is a new proactive approach to developing vaccines, which are created even before the pathogen causing the disease appears, noting that the vaccine in question has already been tested on mice.
The new vaccine serum trains the immune system to recognize specific regions of eight different coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2 (which causes COVID-19) and others currently circulating in bats with the potential to jump to humans and cause a pandemic. .
“The key to its effectiveness is that the specific regions of the virus targeted by the vaccine also appear in several related coronaviruses,” allowing it to protect equally well “against other coronaviruses not represented in the vaccine — including those that have not yet been identified.”
For example, the new vaccine does not involve the SARS-CoV-1 coronavirus, which caused the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak in 2003, but it stimulates an immune response to that virus.
The new “Quartet Nanocage” vaccine is based on a structure called nanoparticles – a ball of proteins held together by strong interactions. Chains of different viral antigens are attached to these nanoparticles using a new ‘protein superglue’, allowing the immune system to be trained to target specific regions shared by a number of coronaviruses.
The underlying technology also has potential to be used in the development of other vaccines.
“Our goal is to create a vaccine that will protect us from the next coronavirus pandemic and be ready before the pandemic starts,” said Rory Hills, a researcher in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Cambridge and lead author of the study. The results are published today in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.
Mark Huart, a professor in the same department and coordinator of the work, pointed out that scientists do not need to “wait for the emergence of new coronaviruses,” because what we know about them is sufficient, as well as about the different immune responses, so that they can do so. “Beginning to build protective vaccines against as yet unknown coronaviruses.”
Scientists have done an excellent job in quickly producing a highly effective vaccine against Covid-19 during the recent pandemic, but the world is still suffering from a huge crisis with a large number of deaths. We need to know how we can do better in the future, and starting to build vaccines early is an important component.
This work is the result of a collaboration between scientists from the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford (UK), and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), US.
Last month, the University of California – Riverside (UCR) in the United States indicated, in a statement, that researchers at the institution revealed a new strategy for a vaccine based on ribonucleic acid (RNA), which is effective against any strain of the virus and is safe even for children and those who have… Weakness in the immune system.
This vaccine targets a portion of the viral genome common to all virus strains and will eliminate the need to create different vaccines depending on variants.
The vaccine, how it works and was shown to be effective in mice, was described in an article published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.