‘All-in-one’ vaccine will train us for unknown coronaviruses

Researchers have developed a vaccine technology shown to protect against a range of coronaviruses — even some we may not have discovered yet.

The scientists, from the universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Caltech in California, used a new approach called “proactive vaccinology” to build a vaccine before a disease-causing pathogen even becomes a threat.

Tested on mice, it works by training the immune system to recognise parts of eight coronaviruses, including several that are circulating in bats and could one day infect humans.

“Our focus is to create a vaccine that will protect us against the next coronavirus pandemic, and have it ready before the pandemic has even started,” said Rory Hills, a graduate researcher in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Pharmacology and the first author of the report.

“We’ve created a vaccine that provides protection against a broad range of different coronaviruses — including ones we don’t even know about yet.”

Conventional vaccines include a single antigen, the marker on the outside of a given virus that causes an immune response.

In this vaccine, researchers used new “quartet nanocage” technology. It includes different viral antigens, held together by a “protein superglue”. This trains the immune system to recognise a broad range of coronaviruses.

By including multiple antigens in the vaccine, the immune system can target specific areas of these antigens that many coronaviruses share. The vaccine does not, for example, include the coronavirus responsible for the 2003 Sars outbreak, but the mice in the trials still produced an immune response to that virus.

The results, published on Monday in Nature Nanotechnology, found that the new vaccine gave a broad immune response, even in mice vaccinated against the strain responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic.

“We don’t have to wait for new coronaviruses to emerge. We know enough about coronaviruses, and different immune responses to them, that we can get going with building protective vaccines against unknown coronaviruses now,” said Professor Mark Howarth in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Pharmacology and the senior author of the research.

“Scientists did a great job in quickly producing an extremely effective Covid vaccine during the last pandemic, but the world still had a massive crisis with a huge number of deaths. We need to work out how we can do even better than that in the future, and a powerful component of that is starting to build the vaccines in advance.”

The research improves on previous work by Oxford and Caltech to develop a novel all-in-one vaccine against coronavirus threats. The latest vaccine is much simpler in design than other broadly protective vaccines in development, which researchers say should accelerate its route to clinical trials.