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October 21, The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention gave permission to the majority of the U.S. population to promote the vaccine against Covid; a shot that was in such high demand that 10 million people somehow managed to get a little safer before that approval. Two days later, the UK government made things a little safer: it announced the emergence of Delta-plus, a new variant that takes up 6 per cent of the country’s cases, and is even more contagious. a highly transmissible Delta.
These joint events caught the nausea of the roller coaster pandemic: Things are getting better. No, they are not. Yes, there are. No, they are certainly no. The endless repetition is tiring. It has led to a loose coalition of scientists asking: What would happen if we stopped the roller coaster?
In numerous articles and preprints published in the last six months, these research groups propose a “universal coronavirus vaccine” that can protect against the entire virus family. This means that the current version of SARS-CoV-2, variants that can escape the protection of existing vaccines, and future coronavirus strains. may appear to cause new pandemics.
It’s a complex project, and no team is close to reaching its goal. Universal vaccines against other recurrent and genetically variable diseases — see, especially, influenza — have been unsuccessful for years. But researchers believe that one of the coronaviruses may be more susceptible, both because this virus is genetically more complex than the one causing the flu, and because it feels uncomfortable with the threat of another coronavirus pandemic.
After all, SARS-CoV-2 is the third coronavirus to become the leading cause of human disease in two decades, after SARS in 2003 and MERS in 2012. Historical epidemiology suggests that there were waves of coronavirus infection. century, du century, and possibly over the millennia. And thousands may still be unidentified coronaviruses are hidden in bats, wildlife and domestic animals, ready to jump between species and create disaster.
“This is not the first coronavirus pandemic we have experienced, and it will not be the last, as we have encountered three coronaviruses with pandemic potential in less than 20 years,” says Pablo Penaloza-MacMaster of immunology viruses and assistant professor at Northwestern University and outlining approaches to universal vaccination the main author in several articles. “We want to be ready for the next pandemic, and it’s preparing for that.”
These research teams are not the only ones who feel a need to work on this. In March, the Coalition on Innovations for the Preparation of Nonprofit Epidemics, the government and philanthropic funding, announced public-private partnerships that would lead to appropriate projects. Up to $ 200 million to support universal research on the coronavirus vaccine.
But here’s the challenge: To make a vaccine that protects against many types, strains, or variants of the virus, researchers need to find some of the characteristics they have. all in common and how our immune system reacts. Then they need to vaccinate that trait. With influenza, for example, each new strain carries small changes in a characteristic called hemagglutinin, a hammer-like protein on the surface of the virus that binds to receptors in lung cells. Because each hemagglutinin is different — researchers actually divide influenza viruses by how divergent these proteins are — the search for a universal flu vaccine has focused less on trying to divert immune system attention from a variable protein head to a handle. variable stem.
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