A new vaccine to fight coronavirus

#vaccine #fight #coronavirus

In a report published by the British newspaper “The Times”, it was explained that scientists from the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and the California Institute of Technology in California used a new approach called “proactive vaccinology” to build a vaccine before the disease-causing agent became a threat.

The vaccine was tested on mice and works by training the immune system to recognize parts of eight coronaviruses, including several that circulate in bats and could one day infect humans.

Rory Hills, a graduate researcher in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Cambridge and first author of the research, said: “Our focus is on creating a vaccine that will protect us from the next coronavirus epidemic, and that will be ready before the epidemic begins.”

“We have created a vaccine that provides protection against a wide range of different coronaviruses, including ones we don’t know about yet,” Hills added.

Traditional vaccines involve a single antigen, the tag on the outside of a particular virus that causes an immune response.

In this vaccine, the researchers used a new “quadruple nanocage” technology, which includes different viral antigens, held together by a “superglue protein,” which trains the immune system to recognize a wide range of coronaviruses.

By including multiple antigens in the vaccine, the immune system can target specific regions of these antigens that are shared by many coronaviruses.

For example, the vaccine does not include the coronavirus responsible for the 2003 SARS outbreak, but mice in the experiments still produced an immune response to this virus.