Evolutionary history of SARS-CoV-2 leads to a universal vaccine already being tested in animal models

By taking inspiration from the evolutionary history of SARS-CoV-2 itself, scientists in China have crafted a new Vaccine that, at least in animal models, provides protection against omicron and an array of its subvariants.

Even though early generations of SARS-CoV-2 Vaccines and boosters have been extremely successful, viral evolution and the emergence of immune evasion have made subsequent Vaccines more difficult to produce. As it turns out, the viral spike protein has regions that have remained highly conserved across recent SARS-CoV-2 variants. These conserved regions are veritable catalogs of evolutionary data with which to craft a next-generation vaccine. The spike protein is the business end of the virus that binds to human ACE-2 receptors to initiate infection.

To address the critical problem of immune escape and to begin the arduous task of developing a new vaccine, Dr. Yongliang Zhao and colleagues at State Key Laboratory of Virology, a division of Wuhan University in China, hope to blunt the impact of subvariants in the future with a new kind of vaccine. The experimental Vaccine they are already testing in lab mice is based on conserved regions of the spike protein, which means the Vaccine is intimately linked to parts of the spike that rarely mutate. The Wuhan team is quietly voicing optimism about their research, which they hope will serve as a model for future vaccines, a pan-protective immunization—a universal shot that guards against existing variants and threats that may arise in the future...Read more

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