Good News- New COVID-19 Vaccine may protect against all variants of Coronavirus!
Anika H. Ahmed, MD
The Coronavirus continues to create havoc in everyone’s life across the globe and researchers are today back at the drawing board, trying to figure out one vaccine that may be able to help the immune system defend against all existing and future variants of the Coronavirus. Some good news came out of the University of Virginia where health professionals are working diligently to develop a vaccine that will offer complete coverage. This new vaccine has so far shown promising results in early animal testing in existing variants and may provide protection against all future variants of Coronavirus.
Developments are as follows:
The scientists at University of Virginia and Virginia Tech Health department are working on a new platform, recently invented, to rapidly develop new vaccines. This new platform will offer developing vaccines at very low cost estimated to about a $1 per vaccine, would be easy to store and transport, even in remote areas of the world and could be produced in existing vaccine manufacturing factories around the world. This could be the key to putting an end to the pandemic!
This new vaccine involves making a DNA that can direct the production of a piece of the virus that can instruct the immune system as to how to start a protective antibody response. This DNA is inserted in another small circle of DNA called a plasmid that can multiply within a bacteria. The plasmid is next introduced to E. Coli bacteria, guiding the bacteria to place pieces of proteins on their surfaces. One major break through is the innovation that E. Coli have had a large number of its genes deleted. Deleting these genes that also includes parts of its outer membrane, cause a substantial increase in the response of the immune system to recognize and respond to the vaccine antigen placed on the surface of the bacteria. This entire process from identifying a potential vaccine target to producing the gene-deleted bacteria that do have the vaccine antigens on their surfaces, need a time frame of only two to three weeks, a speed that will make it ideal to controlling the pandemic, with its fast-upcoming various variants now and in the future.
This vaccine is being tried out in pigs and so far, two such vaccines, one designed to protect against Covid-19 and another developed to protect against porcine epidemic diarrhea virus (PEDV) are being tried out in animals. Both PEDV and the virus that causes Covid-19 are Coronaviruses, but they are not closely related. Like all the Coronaviruses they do share several of the amino acids that form the fusion peptide. PEDV is seen to infect pigs, causing diarrhea, high fever and vomiting, a pig pandemic that has killed about 10% of the US pigs.
Interestingly killed whole-cell vaccines are presently being used widely around the world to cure fatal diseases like Cholera and whopping cough. Factories in many developing and underdeveloped countries are manufacturing million of doses of these vaccines per year, for a low a cost as $1per dose and at times even at much lesser cost. It is a promising possibility to use the technology and innovation to make this new, one vaccine that shall be effective against all the existing and future variants of Coronavirus causing Covid-19.Fingers crossed as more convincing data is collected and human clinical trials begin!