New drug focuses on T-cell immunity
A universal vaccine effective against all strains of coronavirus was created by scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology using artificial intelligence. The immunity that it will help to develop will be relevant even when the body encounters mutated types of covid.
All known COVID-19 vaccines use one or more polypeptides of the SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein, or the so-called spike protein, protruding above the surface of the coronavirus particle.
However, focusing only on the Spike protein as the sole vaccine target turned out not to be the right path. The fact is that Spike evolves rapidly, which means that later other viral variants appear that the old vaccines no longer take.
Researchers decided to rely on the least changing, conservative parts isolated from the entire viral set of coronavirus proteins , the so-called T-cell antigens, which are easily recognized by human T-lymphocytes.
The search for the desired antigens and their combinations, found in the largest number of people, was assigned to neural networks. The resulting drug was tested on mice infected with SARS-CoV-2. Already seven days after being vaccinated with their new MIT-T-COVID vaccine, nearly a quarter of all cells in the animals' lungs had T-lymphocytes. This made it possible to reduce the incidence and prevent mortality in most of them.
The result, according to the authors of the work, inspires confidence that the new vaccine will also be able to protect people from future, as yet unknown strains of coronavirus.
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– The fact that scientists have paid attention to the areas that induce T-cell immunity, that is, fight against & nbsp; infected with covid cells, – this is the correct approach. Unfortunately, this method is a little late in relation to covid, because now this disease has moved into the category of relatively weak ones. However, this work has implications for the future, for vaccines against more common infections such as the flu. As we know, a separate vaccine is made for it every year, depending on the circulating version of the virus. But it is possible, by analogy with MIT-T-COVID, to make a universal flu vaccine.
A person vaccinated with it will most likely get sick (T-cell vaccines do not guarantee full protection of the virus), but this disease will have very mild manifestations: a little bit will flow from the nose and that's it.
True, it should be noted that one cannot expect an early T-cell vaccine against covid for people. After testing in mice, it will take more years to understand if it will be effective at all against the human variant of covid.