Now, the vision is to harness more generalised responders, known as broadly neutralising antibodies. These types of antibodies have been isolated from Covid-19 patients
and found to also neutralise Sars-Cov-1, another virus in the coronavirus family responsible for severe acute respiratory syndrome, or Sars. If they can quash several distinct coronaviruses, then they might also be able to combat current and future variants of the pandemic virus.
The challenge comes in finding a jab that produces these versatile antibodies. One starting point is to identify which parts of the virus remain unchanged as it mutates and then designing vaccines on the basis of these stable regions.
Researchers at the University of Nottingham in the UK are adopting this approach. While current vaccines target the S (spike) protein, they are gunning for both the S protein and the nucleocapsid,
or N, protein. The latter helps the virus to replicate and mutates more slowly than the spike protein. The scientists have
teamed up with the company Scancell and Nottingham Trent University for a phase 1 clinical trial of its vaccine candidate, SN14.
The current jabs might also offer clues, according to Deborah Dunn-Walters, professor of immunology at the University of Surrey and chair of
a Covid-19 task force. “We will eventually have lots of different vaccines and some might be more tolerant of variants than others,” she says. Those, she suggests, could be iterations along the road to a universal vaccine.
www.sudouest.fr
