Study: Vaccines could be viable if mixed

In January, Britain made a change to its vaccine guidelines that shocked many health experts: If the second dose of one vaccine wasn’t available, patients could be given a different one.

The new rule was based on sheer guesswork; there was no scientific data at the time demonstrating that mixing two coronavirus vaccines was safe and effective. But that may change soon.

In February, researchers at the University of Oxford began a trial in which volunteers received a dose of the Pfizerbiontech vaccine followed by a dose of Astrazeneca’s formulation, or vice versa. This month, the researchers will start analyzing the blood of the subjects to see how well the mix-andmatch approach works.

As a growing number of vaccines are being authorized, researchers are testing other combinations. A few are in clinical trials, while others are being tested in animals for now.

Mixing vaccines might do more than just help overcome supply bottlenecks. Some researchers suspect that a pair of different vaccines might work better than two doses of the same one.

The concept of mixing vaccines — sometimes called a heterologous prime-boost — is not new to our pandemic era. For decades, researchers have investigated the approach, hoping to find potent combinations against a range of viruses, such as influenza, HIV and Ebola.

But scientists had little to show for all that research. It was easy enough to demonstrate that two vaccines may work well together in a mouse. But running full-blown clinical trials on a combination of vaccines is a tall order.

Some of the early successes for heterologous prime-boosts came in the search for vaccines for Ebola. Many researchers focused on presenting the immune system with a protein found on the Ebola virus.

The gene for that protein was inserted into a different, harmless virus. When people received an injection of the vaccine, the harmless virus entered their cells; the cells then read the instructions in the Ebola gene and mass-produced Ebola’s surface protein. The immune system encountered the Ebola protein and made antibodies against it. And those antibodies protected the vaccinated people if they were infected with a full-blown Ebola virus.