New vaccine raises immunity hopes

washington — Two studies on monkeys offer hope that humans can develop protective immunity to novel coronavirus.

The studies, published in the journal Science, looked at a prototype vaccine and whether infection with Sars-CoV-2 provides immunity against re-exposure.

The studies were carried out on rhesus macaque monkeys to see whether they develop protective virus immunity from natural infection or from a vaccine.

“The global Covid-19 pandemic has made the development of a vaccine a top biomedical priority, but very little is currently known about protective immunity to the Sars-CoV-2 virus,” said senior author Dan Barouch, director of the Centre for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre in Boston.

“In these two studies, we demonstrate in rhesus macaques that prototype vaccines protected against Sars-CoV-2 infection and that Sars-CoV-2 infection protected against reexposure,” Barouch said.

In one study carried out by Barouch and other researchers, nine adult rhesus macaque monkeys were infected with the virus.

The monkeys developed Covid-19 symptoms but created protective antibodies and recovered after a few days. —