Scientists have made “promising” progress towards developing a universal coronavirus vaccine to tackle Covid-19 and the common cold.
Researchers at the Francis Crick Institute in London have found that a specific region of the spike protein of Sars-CoV-2 – the virus that causes Covid-19 – is a good target for a pan-coronavirus injection that could offer protection against all variants of Covid-19. 19 and common colds.
Developing a vaccine that protects against a number of different coronaviruses is a huge challenge, they said, because this family of viruses has many key differences, mutates frequently and generally induces incomplete protection against re-infection. This is why people can get sick repeatedly from common colds and why it is possible to become infected repeatedly with different variants of Sars-CoV-2.
A universal coronavirus vaccine would need to trigger antibodies that recognize and neutralize a range of coronaviruses, scientists said, stopping the virus from entering host cells and replicating.
In the new study, the researchers investigated whether antibodies targeting the “S2 subunit” of the spike protein of Sars-CoV-2 also neutralized other coronaviruses. The researchers found that after vaccinating mice with Sars-CoV-2 S2, the mice developed antibodies capable of neutralizing a number of other animal and human coronaviruses.
These include the common cold coronavirus HCoV-0C43, the original strain of Sars-CoV-2, the D614G mutant that dominated the first wave, Alpha, Beta, Delta, the original Omicron, and two bat coronaviruses. The findings are published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
“The S2 region of the spike protein is a promising target for a potential pan-coronavirus vaccine because this region is much more similar across different coronaviruses than the S1 region,” said first study co-author Kevin Ng of the Francis Crick Institute. “It’s less prone to mutations, and so a vaccine targeting that area should be more stable.”
Until now, the S2 region of the spike protein had been overlooked as a potential basis for vaccination, the researchers said.
George Kassiotis, corresponding author and principal group leader at the Francis Crick Institute, said: “The expectation for a vaccine that targets the S2 region is that it may offer some protection against all current as well as future coronaviruses.
“This differs from vaccines that target the more variable S1 region, which, while effective against the matching variant against which they are designed, are less able to target other variants or a wide range of coronaviruses.
“There is still much research to be done as we continue to test S2 antibodies against different coronaviruses and look for the most appropriate way to design and test a potential vaccine.”
The researchers will continue their work studying the potential of a pan-coronavirus that targets the S2 region of the spike protein and how it can be integrated with currently licensed vaccines.
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Co-author Nikhil Faulkner, also from the Francis Crick Institute, said: “Although a potential S2 vaccine would not stop people from being infected, the idea is that it would prepare their immune system to respond to a future coronavirus infection.
“Hopefully, this will provide sufficient protection to survive an initial infection, during which they could develop additional immunity specific to that particular virus.”
Professor Penny Ward, visiting professor of pharmaceutical medicine at King’s College London, who was not involved in the study, said a universal coronavirus vaccine “could solve the problem of endless new waves of disease caused by vaccine-reduced variants”. .
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