Researchers say nanotechnology could help develop vaccines rapidly in case of a new pandemic.
Scientists have developed a new vaccine technology that could protect against a broad range of coronaviruses – even ones we don’t yet know about.
This ability to protect against multiple coronaviruses could ‘future-proof’ vaccines that might lose their potency when a pathogen evolves to evade immunity, as happened with newer COVID-19 strains.
“It takes us one step forward towards our goal of creating vaccines before a pandemic has even started.”
Rory Hills, a graduate researcher at the University of Cambridge
The vaccine, which has so far been tested on mice, signals progress in ‘proactive vaccinology’, in which broadly protective vaccines are ready before pandemics emerge to ensure a rapid response.
The collaborative study between the universities of Cambridge and Oxford and the California Institute of Technology was published in Nature Nanotechnology.
“It takes us one step forward towards our goal of creating vaccines before a pandemic has even started,” said Rory Hills, a graduate researcher at the University of Cambridge and first author of the report.
The experimental shot works by binding multiple proteins from different coronaviruses to nanoparticles – about 100,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair – which can then prime the immune system to respond to a threat.
The vaccine trains the immune system to recognise proteins shared across many different coronaviruses, meaning that it could protect against new variants.
For instance, the study showed that the broad protection of the vaccine defended against SARS-CoV-1, the coronavirus that caused the 2003 SARS outbreak, even though proteins from that virus were not added to the nanoparticles.
This broad protection comes from the way nanoparticles can stack different antigens in one tightly packed unit – in this case a ‘nanocage’ – that can trigger the immune system to respond very broadly.
Flu researchers have also been using nanoparticle technology to develop experimental flu shots that protect from a wide variety of seasonal and pandemic influenza strains – a potential universal flu vaccine.
Although mRNA vaccines prevented millions of COVID-19 deaths, the goal next time around would be to have vaccines ready to go from the start. “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,” said Prof Mark Howarth, a senior author of the study.
