There’s a new call from the White House to develop vaccines that might protect against future SARSCoV2 mutants or even unknown coronaviruses—but the scientific, logistical, and regulatory hurdles for any next-generation vaccines are high.
There’s a new call from the White House to develop vaccines that might protect against future SARS-CoV-2 mutants or even unknown coronaviruses. “The vaccines we have are terrific, but we can do better than terrific,” Ashish Jha, White House COVID-19 response coordinator, said at a vaccine summit yesterday that gathered researchers, companies, and government officials. “Ultimately, we need vaccines that can protect us no matter what Mother Nature throws at us.
“We want to start clinical trials tomorrow, but there are lots of barriers to getting there,” says Yale University immunologist Akiko Iwasaki, a panelist at the White House summit who has a vaccine candidate that’s administered as a nasal spray. For starters, funding remains far tighter than in the Warp Speed days: The Coalition for Preparedness Innovations has invested a more modest $200 million in 11 efforts run by small companies and academics, and the U.S.
The “pan” in potential next generation vaccines is often in the eyes of the beholder, as the projects underway have a variety of aims. The most modest, but still ambitious, goal is to avoid racing to create specific boosters that play catch-up with the latest SARS-CoV-2 variant and instead to develop vaccines that can reliably ward off severe disease from any future mutants of the pandemic coronavirus.
All of the work in this area is “really quite early,” says Melanie Saville, who heads vaccine R&D at CEPI. “I would classify this as high-risk, high-reward research,” she says. “We have to manage people's expectations here.” NIAID only funds two investigator-initiated grants for pancoronavirus vaccine research. One went to Lbashir BenMohamed, an immunologist at the University of California, Irvine, who has a 5-year, $3.6 million grant and had hoped to enter clinical trials this year. But his team, too, has had to wait for access to animal models, which it needs to select the most promising vaccine candidate. He now is looking at 2023—if his team can overcome another challenge.
Graham, who now is at Morehouse College, also notes that the immune response to any new SARS-CoV-2 vaccine will be skewed by the immune system’s memory of the first viral proteins it encountered, whether through vaccination or infection with one of the many variants that have circulated. So assessing the new vaccines’ ability to provide broader protection may require trials in people who have “no competition in the immune system”—which in many countries would now mean infants.
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