New, more contagious variants of coronavirus are being investigated in the United States, raising questions about whether Covid vaccines currently in use will provide protection against mutations.
There are several more contagious variants that occur worldwide, in the United Kingdom, South Africa and Brazil. In the US, variants from New York and California have been identified.
To date, studies suggest that currently used vaccines may recognize emerging variants – but do not provide as much protection against these new strains. The South African variant, for example, reduced the protection of Pfizer-BioNTech antibodies by two-thirds, according to a February study. Modernizing neutralizing antibodies have decreased sixfold with the South African variant.
(There are several reasons why antibodies generated after a vaccine may recognize a variant, but will not fight it as well. Antibodies protect you by attaching to each individual spike protein on the surface of the coronavirus, which prevents it from infecting you. If a variant often produces more virus, the antibodies may not be able to be attached to all those pieces of the virus as accurately or efficiently.)
But stimulants and new versions of vaccines targeting variants are already being explored.
The three vaccines that have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for Moderna, Pfizer-BioNTech and Johnson & Johnson work in different ways and therefore have different approaches to handling the variants. Here’s what we know:
Modern
Moderna is testing using a third dose of the existing vaccine, as well as using a booster shot targeting the South African variant. (He sent evidence to the National Institutes of Health for clinical trials on February 24.)
Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel said the company “is committed to making as many updates to our vaccine as possible until the pandemic is under control,” in a Feb. 24 press release.
The Moderna vaccine uses messenger RNA or “mRNA” technology to deliver genetic material to cells, with instructions for making a non-infectious piece of coronavirus protein. The immune system recognizes copies of the spike protein and creates antibodies against it. If a fully vaccinated person is exposed to the real virus in the future, the body can remember how to trigger an immune response and create antibodies to fight the virus.
Boosters for the new variants use the same technology as Moderna’s original Covid vaccine. Bancel said it was essentially a matter of “copying and pasting” the new mutations in the vaccine. Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett, who led the team responsible for the Moderna vaccine, calls the approach “plug and play.”
It could take months for the clinical data to be ready for review and even longer for the stimulants to be approved, produced and ready for administration.
Modern President Stephen Hoge told Scientific American that if variants begin to dominate infections in the coming months, the company is ready to “find out when and how.” Hoge did not comment when the amplifier will be available.
Pfizer-BioNTech
Pfizer-BioNTech is also testing a third booster vaccine of its vaccine (which is an mRNA vaccine) in people who were fully vaccinated in the phase 1 study. at 12 months after being completely vaccinated.
In addition, the company is discussing a clinical trial for a “variant-specific vaccine,” which is a reconstituted version of its original vaccine using the South African strain, according to a statement.
“We believe our vaccine is strongly active against all strains,” Pfizer scientific director Mikael Dolsten said in a February 25 interview. In the future, it is “a reasonable possibility” that people will need regular booster shots, Dolsten said. Or, companies may need to change the stems every few years to adapt, he said.
Like Moderna, the Pfizer mRNA vaccine is quite adaptable.
“The flexibility of our mRNA vaccine platform allows us to technically develop booster vaccines in a few weeks, if necessary,” Ugur Sahin, CEO and co-founder of BioNTech, said in a statement.
This regulatory pathway is already established for other infectious diseases, such as influenza. We are taking these measures to ensure long-term immunity against the virus and its variants.
Johnson & Johnson
The latest vaccine to obtain emergency food use from the Food and Drug Administration had a 72% efficacy rate for the prevention of moderate disease in the United States, but in South Africa, where an extremely contagious mutation of the virus is the variant The main efficacy was 64% effective in preventing moderate to severe or critical Covid, according to FDA data. In Brazil, the vaccine was 66% effective.
(Experts say it is worth noting that the Johnson & Johnson studies took place when the new variants had already become the dominant strains in South Africa and Brazil, while the Moderna and Pfizer studies took place before this happened. )
The Johnson & Johnson single-dose vaccine uses an adenovirus, a common cold-causing virus, as a messenger to provide instructions to the body’s cells.
Johnson & Johnson CEO Alex Gorsky said the company is well positioned to adapt the vaccine to variants and is working on software development that “will help address some of these new and emerging variants,” during an interview with CNBC. “Squawk Box” March 1 He did not explain how the software will work.
“We are quite confident based on the clinical data we already have with our vaccine that we will see a very robust response, but we are doing exactly the same thing at the same time. [as other companies working on variants]”Gorsky said.
Novavax
Although the Novavax two-shot Covav vaccine is not yet approved in the United States, the company expects to receive FDA approval by May.
Data from the UK study in January show that the vaccine was over 89% effective in protecting against Covid and 85.6% against the UK variant. But the Novavax vaccine was less than 50% effective for the South African strain.
Novavax is working on a third booster that could be tested in April, a company spokesman told Scientific American.
Novavax is a two-dose “protein subunit” vaccine, which means that it contains harmless pieces of surface protein that directly trigger the immune system. So, in essence, scientists can add different strains to the existing vaccine as variants appear.
Novavax CEO Stanley Erck told NPR that Covid vaccines can be modified “very easily,” similar to how an influenza vaccine is modified each year to suit prominent strains.
It could even be a “bivalent vaccine”, which is a vaccine that protects against several strains of a virus. “So we will use the original Wuhan strain and the South African strain [to tweak the vaccine] and test it on people probably in the second quarter of this year, “Erck told NPR.
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