With the coronavirus vaccine roll-out here, there are questions around how effective it will be against current and future mutations, spearheading a rapid search for answers.

COVID-19 is not the first virus to make the leap into humans, and it probably won’t be the last. Scientists developed vaccines in record time, thanks to mRNA technology, but with the virus rapidly mutating there are questions around our future and the on-going need for new vaccines.

Messenger RNA, usually called mRNA, technology is now a decade old. mRNA vaccines take advantage of the process that cells use to make proteins in order to trigger an immune response and build immunity. 

mRNA means we don’t have to use the traditional method for developing vaccines, using weakened or inactivated versions of the disease-causing pathogen to stimulate the body’s immune response to create antibodies. mRNA technology was credited as the reason behind swift development of the new vaccines, and they are all performing well.

However, looking to the future, scientists say we need a different kind of vaccine – one that will protect us against other coronaviruses, even those we haven’t encountered yet.

Work has already started, with human trials already planned for this year.

In the past 20 years, the world has had three outbreaks of disease caused by novel coronaviruses: SARS, MERS and now COVID-19, also referred to as SARS-CoV-2.

SARS and MERS are very deadly, but not very transmissible. COVID-19 is less deadly by comparison, but highly transmissible. 

In a recent article in New Scientist, scientists point to the possibility of the next coronavirus having the transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2 combined with the high mortality resulting from the SARS and MERS viruses.

The solution, they say, is to develop a universal coronavirus vaccine that is effective against all coronaviruses.

A universal coronavirus vaccine would need to identify a region of the virus that is so integral to its survival that it is conserved across all coronaviruses and their mutations.

A universal vaccine may be in our future.

Calls to create a universal vaccine first started back in 2014. Scientists at the University of Dhaka in Bangladesh discovered an epitope within an enzyme that was universal across all known human coronaviruses. 

They published their results1 and suggested the epitope as a target for a universal vaccine, but their findings were not followed up.

Since then, scientists have also found common features in the spike proteins that coronaviruses use to enter our cells. These are another potential target for a universal vaccine because coronaviruses are unlikely to be able to escape them by mutating, as any mutation involving the spike protein would probably render the virus inactive.

Scientists have also generated antibodies in the lab that are broadly effective against SARS, MERS and COVID-19.

So, we now have several biotech companies working to formulate a universal vaccine.

ConserV Bioscience in the UK has put out a statement that it is developing an mRNA vaccine that covers the full spectrum of coronaviruses, including those that cause the common cold. They are not yet revealing exactly how their vaccine might work.

VBI Vaccines announced it is planning to begin human trials of a universal vaccine that targets SARS-CoV, SARS-Cov-2 and MERS-CoV spike proteins, in Canada later this year.

“Over the last several months, the preclinical results achieved with our two coronavirus vaccine candidates continue to excite us”, says VBI CEO Jeff Baxter.

“The COVID-19 challenge we face as an industry is two-fold: first, how do we get the ongoing pandemic under control, and second, how do we ensure long-term protection against known and emerging coronaviruses.”

The company has been awarded CAD$56 million by the Canadian Government to further its research.

The race to develop the current vaccines for SARS-CoV-2 was won in record time thanks to the international focus and mRNA. The next race, it seems, is just starting.

1.     https://bmcbioinformatics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2105-15-161

Information on universal vaccine research published in New Scientist, 24 February 2021.

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