The vaccines that the world’s leading pharmaceutical firms have developed to prevent COVID-19 work really well. Against the novel coronavirus, that is.
But SARS-CoV-2 isn’t the only coronavirus out there; there are more pathogens like the one that causes COVID-19. And it may be only a matter of time before some new coronavirus jumps from whatever animal population harbors it to human beings. When it does, it could wreak as much havoc as SARS-CoV-2, if not more. That’s what worries a team of scientists led by Barton Haynes and Kevin Saunders at Duke University. And what motivated them, a year ago, to begin work on a new vaccine that could work against a whole bunch of coronaviruses.
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The new vaccine is intended to guard against a few threats: some coronaviruses we already know about, but also ones we haven’t discovered yet—and new variants of each.
You could call it a super-vaccine—a one-stop shop for advanced protection from many of the world’s nastiest pathogens, one that could empower a whole new approach to containing coronaviruses and preventing pandemics. “The only alternative… is what I call the whack-a-mole approach,” Haynes, an immunologist with Duke’s Human Vaccine Institute, told The Daily Beast. “Wait until something happens, then do something about it.”
Haynes, Saunders, and their colleagues aren’t alone. There are around two dozen “pan-coronavirus” vaccine projects underway all over the world. If early data is any indication, the Duke effort could be among the first to produce a deployable vaccine.
The Duke team was working on an HIV vaccine when the pandemic broke out in late 2019. They quickly shifted their focus. While big pharma mobilized tens of billions of dollars in research & development funding—much of it provided by the U.S. government—to produce a wide array of vaccines to address SARS-CoV-2, Haynes and Saunders and their teammates set their sights on the viruses that might come after that pathogen.
Major new variants or entirely new coronaviruses. SARS-CoV-3, if you will.
What they decided early on was that they needed a really powerful coronavirus antibody with what Haynes described as “broadly neutralizing” qualities. After inspecting 2,000 different antibodies, they found what they were looking for in an 18-year-old sample from someone who caught, and recovered from, SARS-CoV-1—an older cousin of SARS-CoV-2 that fueled its own pandemic back in 2003.
That antibody, which the Duke team calls “DH1047,” targets the spike protein that coronaviruses use to attach to and infect our cells. Haynes, Saunders, and their peers immunized macaque monkeys with DH1047, then exposed the animals to a menu of pathogens including SARS-CoV-2 and some of its major variants—as well as other coronaviruses.
“It worked wonderfully well,” Haynes said. The experimental vaccine produced a titer—a measure of antibody concentration—of 47,000. That’s six times higher than the typical titer resulting from the messenger-RNA vaccines that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has authorized for emergency use against COVID-19.
The Duke team published their initial results in Nature last week. They stressed to The Daily Beast that their experimental vaccine, while seemingly effective against a wide range of coronaviruses, does not prevent infections by the various coronaviruses that cause the common cold.
It should be possible to adapt mRNA technology to produce a vaccine based on DH1047, Haynes said. After all, mRNA is just a vehicle. If you switch up the genetic code in the vaccine, you change the vaccine itself. This is why Pfizer and Moderna have expressed some confidence in being able to roll out booster shots against the novel coronavirus, if necessary.
“The benefit of this [pan] vaccine is that it elicits extremely potent inhibitory immune responses against SARS-COV-2 and its difficult-to-block variants,” Saunders, the director of research at the Duke Human Vaccine Institute, told The Daily Beast. “Additionally, this vaccine elicits immunity against SARS-related viruses that circulate in bats and pangolins.”
The leading theory since late 2019 has been that the novel coronavirus was present in bat or pangolin populations for many years and finally infected its first human carrier at an illicit wildlife market in Wuhan, China. That said, in Science magazine this past week, a slew of top experts made the case for a more thorough investigation of the origins of the novel coronavirus, noting they did not think the so-called Wuhan Lab theory—often embraced by the far right—had been disproven.
Either way, it seems likely that so-called “animal reservoirs” hide other coronaviruses.
Some of these animal viruses might be even nastier than SARS-CoV-2. Saunders and Haynes said their universal vaccine could be an insurance policy against those pathogens making the leap to homo sapiens.
“Think what we could do if—when—the next outbreak occurs,” Haynes said. “We could pull something off the shelf that’s already been through phase 1 trials and could be rapidly deployed with emergency-use authorization to the site of the outbreak to wall that off.”
That’s assuming the DH1047 vaccine actually works, of course. There’s no guarantee that formal trials will produce the same encouraging results as limited laboratory testing on monkeys. “Sometimes vaccines to protect against multiple related viruses work well... and sometimes they don’t,” James Lawler, an infectious disease expert at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, told The Daily Beast.
Pan-smallpox vaccines work really well, Lawler noted. But pan-dengue vaccines don’t, he pointed out. It’s too soon to say whether the Duke vaccine will be more like the former or the latter.
The only way to be sure is to test, test, test. First on animals, and then on people in ever-larger groups. Haynes said the Duke team is looking for the funding and the industry partners it needs to take the next step with DH1047. Ideally, he said, a vaccine including the seemingly flexible DH1047 antibody would be available a year from now.
Not coincidentally, that’s when immunity resulting from current COVID-19 vaccinations might start to wear off on a large scale, experts have told The Daily Beast. At that point, with SARS-CoV-2 and related viruses likely still posing a major threat, people will either need booster shots of their original vaccine—or they’ll need a brand-new vaccine.
If they opt for a new vaccine, Haynes said, it should be one that not only protects against today’s coronavirus—but tomorrow’s, too.
“Since we are experiencing a new coronavirus outbreak every eight to 10 years, having immunity against the viruses that cause such outbreaks in humans could prevent or control future coronavirus outbreaks,” Saunders said. “Thus, this vaccine is important for controlling SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern, as well as preventing future outbreaks.”
