In a recent MIT Technology Review article, Adam Piore writes that Nanoparticles could be the key to creating a new universal Covid vaccine to protect against any variants pf of the Covid virus and thus ending this long pandemic.
California Institute of Technology (CIT) researchers have been attempting to engineer a “universal” flu vaccine to “train the body’s immune system to recognize portions of the influenza virus that the pathogen wouldn’t be able to change or disguise even as it evolved”.
MIT researcher Alexander Cohen, who had previously worked at CIT on “universal” flu virus told MIT Review “We’re definitely going to need something like this to fight covid-19 as new variants emerge. But beyond that, the potential for new global outbreaks and pandemics caused by other coronaviruses is clear. We need something that can prevent new covid-19-like scenarios from happening again. And we need it as soon as possible.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has previously called for a “universal” covid-19 vaccine. In a OPEd published on the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Fauci and his colleague wrote “Scientific evidence and ecologic reality suggest that coronaviruses will emerge again in the future, potentially posing an existential threat.”
In a recently published article in the journal Science, Alexander Cohen and colleague write “their mosaic nanoparticle vaccine protected mice and nonhuman primates against the delta and beta covid-19 variants as well as the human viruses that caused the first SARS outbreak in 2003. The results are perhaps the most promising evidence yet that this new kind of custom-designed, bioengineered vaccine could be the answer we so desperately need to avoid future coronavirus pandemics.”
The key to the universal vaccine is the mosaic nanoparticle with so many different viral fragments clustered in close proximity on its surface.
– MIT Review
Explaining to their findings, Cohen told MIT Review “There are parts of many viruses that don’t change. But unfortunately, our body does a much poorer job of recognizing these conserved sites. There seems to be a preference for your antibody response to recognize the highly variable sites. And viruses are good at changing the parts the immune system most easily recognizes.”
According to Cohen, it would probably take couple more years before their technology becomes a reality. The vaccine have to undergo rigorous testing and also has to meet manufacturing standard. However, researchers are optimistic that this vaccine would soon become a reality.