New technologies might provide more potent or broader immunity — but will have to fight for market share.
. Adapted from A. C. WallsVaccines against the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 have been given to billions of people to protect them from COVID-19, and have saved more than 20 million lives. But viral variants can evade some of the immunity provided by the original vaccines. As a result, vaccine developers around the world are working on dozens of ‘next-generation’ COVID-19 vaccines: not just updates of the first versions, but ones that use new technologies and platforms.
Broadly speaking, this immune response comes from B cells, which produce antibodies that can block SARS-CoV-2 from infecting cells, and from T cells, which can destroy infected cells . will follow, to try to keep up with viral evolution — although it’s not clear whether the protection they offer will be particularly long-lasting as immunity wanes and SARS-CoV-2 evolves further.To tackle SARS-CoV-2 variants, the vaccine developers Pfizer–BioNTech and Moderna introduced updated mRNA vaccines last year. These are called bivalent, because they encode molecules of the spike protein from the original virus and from Omicron.
The goal of some of these vaccines is to generate an immune response against particular regions of the spike protein that are conserved across SARS-CoV-2 variants and some related coronavirus species, meaning that they tend not to mutate in new variants. One region of interest is the receptor-binding domain , which binds to the ACE2 receptor protein on human cells and is targeted by some of the body’s most potent infection-blocking antibodies.
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