Since the COVID-19 outbreak first began in late December 2019, intense efforts to develop vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 quickly led to the emergency use authorization of several candidates. More about the currently approved vaccines The team says further research is needed to develop the scaffold into a bona fide vaccine for protection against SARS-CoV-2 and other viruses.Ī pre-print version of the research paper is available on the bioRxiv * server, while the article undergoes peer review. “Our data highlight that multimerized SARS-CoV-2 subunit vaccines are a highly efficacious modality, particularly when combined with an ultra-stable scaffold,” says Jan Löwe and colleagues. The researchers showed that a ferritin-like protein from the archaeon Sulfolobus islandicus coupled with different antigens from SARS-CoV-2 formed extremely stable vaccine nanoparticles that completely protected mice from SARS-CoV-2-associated pneumonia and disease after just a single immunization. The team – from the University of Liverpool and the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge – says the sub-unit approach offers distinct advantages over mRNA-based vaccines in terms of the ease and cost of production, the robustness of material and the potency of protection. Researchers in the UK have developed a protein-based subunit vaccine directed against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) that could serve as an alternative to the mRNA-based vaccines currently approved for protecting against coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).

Protein scaffold vaccine bacteria