Here is who is working on a vaccine against all Covid variants
Is it possible to produce a vaccine capable of fighting all variants of Covid (including Omicron)? This is what the US military is trying to do and the results look promising. All the details
It seems like a chimera, no more worries that another mutation of the virus will come and you almost have to start from scratch, no more races in search of a new serum, yet someone is trying to achieve all this.
The virus certainly cannot be eliminated, but the US military is testing a vaccine that could be effective against all Covid variants and previous viruses of SARS origin. To break the news is Defense One , according to which within a few weeks researchers at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (Wrair) expect to announce that tests on humans can also fight Omicron and other possible future strains.
HOW THE VACCINE IS MADE
Defense One explained that the vaccine, called Spike Ferritin Nanoparticle (SpFN), unlike all the others in existence, uses a 24-sided soccer ball-shaped protein, which allows scientists to attack the tips of multiple coronavirus strains. on different faces of the protein.
The vaccine,Quartz writes, is part of the Institute's "pan-SARS" strategy that aims to produce drugs for this and future pandemics. SpFN, the Wrair website reads , also has the advantage of being a potentially global vaccine because it remains stable over a wide range of temperatures.
I STUDY
The Wrair lab at the Silver Spring, Maryland military base has been working on the project for two years. When it received the first Covid genomic sequence in early 2020, the Infectious Diseases Department decided to focus on making a vaccine that would work not only against the original strain, but also against all of its potential variants.
THE EXPERIMENTATION
Animal testing was completed earlier this year for the SpFN vaccine with positive results. Phase 1 of the human trial (the one that verifies that vaccines are safe and produce antibodies) concluded this month, once again reaching encouraging results that are under final review, said Dr Kayvon Modjarrad, director of the disease branch. of the Walter Reed, in Defense One .
The preclinical results were published in Science Translational Medicine . The vaccine will now need to undergo stages 2 and 3.
The human trial took longer than expected because the laboratory needed to test the vaccine on subjects who had neither been vaccinated nor previously infected.
THE TESTS ON OMICRON
Last week, Walter Reed officials said the vaccine had not been tested on the Omicron variant, but then told Defense One that while the recently discovered variant was not part of the animal studies, it was then laboratory tested on human clinical samples.
Modjarrad said they are waiting for some data before making official announcements, but "so far everything has gone exactly as we had hoped".
THE NEXT STEPS
In addition to carrying out the experimentation of the new vaccine, the Walter Reed experts also intend to see how it interacts with previously vaccinated or infected people also because, as Modjarrad recalled, between the vaccination campaigns and the speed with which the Omicron variant is spreading around the world it will be increasingly difficult to find people who are neither vaccinated nor infected.
Wrair, meanwhile, is working with an industrial partner – which he has not yet named – to produce the vaccines for upcoming trials and for a wider audience if the vaccine proves effective and is approved by regulators.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/sanita/ecco-chi-lavora-a-un-vaccino-contro-tutte-le-varianti-covid/ on Thu, 23 Dec 2021 13:09:55 +0000.