Scientists Develop More Effective Vaccine against COVID-19

Sep, 2021 - By WMR

Scientists from the U.S., Switzerland, and Australia have developed a new COVID-19 vaccine which is more effective against new variants of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2.

The unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic posed a challenge to the healthcare domain. Healthcare professionals across the globe are applying different measures to combat the virus. Scientists, researchers, and pharmaceutical companies are putting on their efforts to develop novel therapeutics for COVID-19 infection since the inception of the virus in late 2019. They are successful in their efforts and have generated vaccines such as Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, Moderna vaccine, Janssen vaccine, among others which have been approved by the World Health Organization for emergency use to fight against the virus. Previous studies have revealed that majority of these vaccines are effective in combating the disease. However, SARS-CoV-2 is a Ribonucleic Acid (RNA) virus that has a tendency to mutate often. This characteristic of the coronavirus is a threat for the global population as the vaccines may become ineffective with time as new strains of the virus evolve. Unfortunately, the neutralizing antibodies generated either by vaccination or natural infection are not maintained at stable levels in the body and tend to decrease over time. This has raised the importance for subsequent booster doses for long-term protection against the coronavirus specially the emerging variants of concern. Thus, considering the need of the hour, scientists from the U.S., Australia, and Switzerland have developed CoVac-II, a new COVID-19 vaccine. The scientists administered the vaccine on mice. They examined the neutralizing effect of the antibodies generated in mice in response to the vaccine against the original strain of the virus and Alpha and Beta variants. They revealed that the neutralizing antibodies were effective against the variants as well.

Taken together, the scientists concluded that CoVac-II is a promising vaccine candidate against SARS-CoV-2 and its variants of concern. It is more effective than other COVID-19 vaccines.