Researchers have developed a novel trivalent vaccine that offers broad protection from SARS-CoV-2 and additional bat sarbecoviruses. The trivalent vaccine could provide medical professionals with a more sustainable and efficient means of treatment for common viruses.
The mRNA vaccines developed throughout the COVID-19 pandemic were groundbreaking, however, updating boosters for these vaccines annually is inefficient. Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Wisconsin-Madison recently published the results of their study in which they developed a potentially groundbreaking trivalent vaccine to offer broad protections for all sarbecoviruses.
"We had been working on strategies to make a broadly protective vaccine for a while," said Ravi Kane, professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. "This vaccine may protect not just against the current strain circulating that year, but also future variants."
Published in Nature Communications, the vaccine relies on three prominent spike proteins to elicit a broad enough response to provide excellent efficacy against SARS-CoV-2 variants and additional sarbecoviruses.
"If you know which variant is circulating, you can immunize with the spike protein of that variant," said Ph.D. student Kathryn Loeffler. "But a broad vaccine is more difficult to develop because you're protecting against many different antigens versus just one."
The researchers have tested the vaccine in hamsters, an animal the team had previously identified as a suitable animal model for SARS-CoV-2 research. During the testing, the vaccine neutralized SARS-CoV-2 omicron variants and non-SARS-CoV-2 coronaviruses currently circulating in bats. The vaccine appears to offer complete protection from the viruses, leaving no detectable virus in the lungs of the hamsters.
Ravi Kane is hopeful that the vaccine strategy developed could be used for other viruses, including other families of coronavirus and influenza. The researchers believe that the antigens outlined in the paper could be ready to move to preclinical trials with the ultimate goal of offering a routine trivalent vaccine to the market.