Around 1.5 million people die every year around the world due to a lack of effective vaccines. There is an urgent need to develop better universal vaccines against existing diseases, including, COVID, flu, and malaria, as well as future-proof vaccines that can cope with the emergence of new threats and variants.
Vaccines work by training the immune system to recognize and respond to infection with a specific pathogen, such as a virus, parasite, or bacteria.
At the heart of every vaccine is an antigen – a small, safe molecule based on part of the pathogen, which triggers the protective immune response.
Most vaccine antigens are based on a single pathogen component, such as the spike protein of the COVID SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus or the coat protein of the malaria parasite, which limits their effectiveness and ability to cope with new variants.
In this new vaccine design, ‘pick and mix’ antigens effectively present the immune system with a toolkit of everything it is likely to need to know about how to recognize and respond to a particular pathogen, both now and in the future.
The antigen designs can then be fed into any vaccine technology platform, including mRNA, DNA, and viral vectors, to create universal future-proof vaccines that should be effective against all current and likely variants.
The research team developed this new design by feeding the small amount of existing data about SARS-CoV-2 into their algorithm, which correctly predicted major variants such as Alpha and Delta that would not emerge for another year.
Vaccine research is often obsessed with developing new delivery methods, with little innovation in the underlying antigens that drive immunity. Innovations in antigen selection by computation have only just started.
Source: Medindia
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