"pan-coronavirus" vaccine — one that offers protection against multiple variants of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.
"However, since September of 2020, there have been five SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta. and now the Omicron," Fauci said in Wednesday's briefing. A universal coronavirus vaccine — or even just a pan-coronavirus vaccine — could shift the strategy entirely. For a vaccine to work across different types of coronaviruses, that"Achilles' heel" should be a part of the virus that stays uniform across variants and over time; so as viruses mutate, the part that the vaccine targets probably won't change much.
"We try to find antibodies that bind to conserved sites; and so what that means is, we go into individuals that have been infected with a particular virus, and we start mining their immune response to understand what's effective and what's not effective," Saunders told Gupta. "And so we found that antibody. We then solved the structure — meaning that we figured out exactly where it binds on SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV-1, and then we used that as our vaccine concept," Saunders said."When we vaccinated non-human primates with our vaccine, they then generated these antibodies that look like DH1047."
Scientists at the National Institutes of Health's NIAID influenza research program have been working to create a universal flu shot, which the program describes as a vaccine that provides robust, long-lasting protection against multiple subtypes of flu, rather than a select few. Studies are still underway.
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