Covid-19 vaccine less sensitive to mutations developed in Sweden
A new generation of coronavirus vaccine is being developed by Swedish researchers from the Karolinska Institutet.
The vaccine is specifically designed to be less sensitive to mutations and better equipped for any future strains.
Promising results
The vaccine showed promising results in mice in a recently published study in EMBO Molecular Medicineand the researchers now hope to take it to safety studies in humans.
Matti Sällberg, professor at the Department of Laboratory Medicine, Karolinska Institutet said: “This is a new generation of corona vaccine.
“The idea is that it will provide broader protection that is more similar to what you get after an actual infection and will be a little more future-proof than the vaccines currently in use.”
Sällberg is the last author of the study together with Ali Mirazimi, adjunct professor at the same department.
The mutability of the virus
They say that different types of vaccines have been very crucial in preventing the pandemic caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. One challenge is the mutability of the virus, i.e. its ability to change to evade the human defense response.
Most current vaccines are based on using parts of the so-called spike protein of the coronavirus to trigger the body’s immune response against the virus.
The researchers note that this is a good vaccine protein to use, but that, unfortunately, it is the spike protein where frequent mutations occur, which can affect the vaccines’ effectiveness.
Spike protein
The researchers at Karolinska Institutet therefore began to develop a vaccine that contains more parts of the virus, including those that do not mutate at the same rate as the spike protein.
The vaccine is one DNA vaccine, which means that it includes DNA sequences that, when injected into the body, cause the cells to produce the proteins for which the DNA sequences contain instructions. In this case, it is about DNA for parts of the spike protein from three different coronavirus variants and DNA for two additional viral proteins, called M and N, where mutations are less common.
In this recently published study, the researchers show that the vaccine protects mice against severe infection from the beta variant of SARS-CoV-2, a variant that can evade the immune response, and activates immune cells (T cells) that recognize the coronavirus found in bats.
Booster
The researchers hope that the vaccine can one day be used as a booster to be given as a top-up after a basic vaccination with other vaccines.
Sällberg added: “The next step is to test it on humans in a small safety study, a so-called phase I study, and we have submitted authorization applications for this.”
The vaccine has been designed and tested at Karolinska Institutet in collaboration with Karolinska University Hospital and the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden.
Infection studies and toxicological studies have been carried out with the Public Health Agency and Adlego Biomedical, a company based in Solna, Sweden. Northx Biologics in Matfors, Sweden, has developed the vaccine.
The vaccine is administered with a newly developed instrument for DNA vaccination produced by the Italian company IGEA Biomedical. The project also involves researchers from the German Justus Liebig University, who have studied how the innate immune response is affected by the vaccine.
Earlier this month, researchers at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and Sweden’s University of Agriculture discovered that spider silk proteins can be fused together into biologically active proteins and turned into a gel at body temperature.