Genetic Engineering and Biotech News
Scientists at the University of California, Riverside have developed a new, RNA-based vaccine strategy that could be effective against just about any strain of a virus, and can be used safely even for babies or the immunocompromised.
The new strategy would eliminate the need to create annual vaccines for viruses such as influenza, or SARS-CoV-2, because it targets a part of the viral genome that is common to all strains of a virus. “What I want to emphasize about this vaccine strategy is that it is broad,” said UCR virologist Rong Hai, PhD. “It is broadly applicable to any number of viruses, broadly effective against any variant of a virus, and safe for a broad spectrum of people. This could be the universal vaccine that we have been looking for.”
Hai and colleagues describe how the vaccine strategy works, and report on a demonstration of its efficacy in mice, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in a paper titled “Live-attenuated virus vaccine defective in RNAi suppression induces rapid protection in neonatal and adult mice lacking mature B and T cells.”
“Global control of infectious diseases depends on the continuous development and deployment of diverse vaccination strategies,” the authors wrote. For example, every year, researchers try to predict the four influenza strains that are most likely to be prevalent during the upcoming flu season. And every year, people line up to get their updated vaccine, hoping the researchers formulated the shot correctly. The same is true of COVID vaccines, which have been reformulated to target sub-variants of the most prevalent circulating strains.
Traditionally, vaccines contain either a dead or modified, live version of a virus. The body’s immune system recognizes a protein in the virus and mounts an immune response. This response produces T-cells that attack the virus and stop it from spreading. It also produces “memory” B-cells that train your immune system to protect you from future attacks. However, as the authors noted, “Currently available live-attenuated and killed virus vaccines typically take a week or longer to activate specific protection by the adaptive immunity.”