Local researchers take shot at vaccine
Effort eventually could protect against all coronaviruses — and it’s only $1 per dose
Dr. Steven Zeichner’s goal when he started work on a coronavirus vaccine in the early days of the pandemic was not necessarily to be the first to market. The federal government’s Operation Warp Speed was on top of that.
But “at this point, you feel like if anybody has anything to contribute that could be possibly helpful, you feel obligated to try,” the University of Virginia professor and infectious disease researcher told The Pilot last March.
One of his top priorities was that his vaccine be cheap and easily reproducible enough to be manufactured and used all over the world.
He may now be well on his way. Zeichner and a researcher at Virginia Tech, Dr. Xiang-Jin Meng, recently published initial results of their work on a coronavirus vaccine. (The study has not yet been reviewed by peers.)
Based on what they found in pigs — they have not yet tested humans — they believe their vaccine strategy could eventually be used to protect against a host of coronaviruses, from those that affect farm animals to ones that cause the common cold and, of course, COVID-19.
And each dose could cost only $1. By comparison, the major existing COVID-19 vaccines usually run about $15-20 — not drastically expensive for places like the U.S., but out of reach for many lower-income countries.
Zeichner’s research began before the pandemic, when he was looking to make an inexpensive vaccine against HIV. When COVID-19 hit, his team quickly switched over, hoping to apply the same tools against this new and different virus.
The key component of the Virginia researchers’ vaccine is bacteria. Bacteria have an outer membrane, the surface of which they fill with proteins to interact with their environment, Zeichner said. The researchers thought: Why don’t we genetically engineer these bacteria so that those outer proteins ward off the coronavirus instead? So they did. Bacteria already is used to create vaccines around the world — to fight whooping cough, for example. It’s cheap and easy to grow, Zeichner said. But the researchers also had to target the coronavirus specifically. Think of the “now-classic” illustration of the coronavirus, featuring those notorious red spikes that give it its name, Zeichner said. There’s a part of those spikes that attaches to your cells to infect you with the virus.
The vaccines already in use are very effective at neutralizing that process. But Zeichner said that the spikes appear to be good at evolving, such as in the variant strains from South Africa or the United Kingdom that have shown to be more transmissible.
Zeichner instead focused on a part of the virus that doesn’t change, so that a vaccine would work on any future variants. It’s called a fusion peptide, and they’ve observed it in all variations of the virus.
At the end of last year, Meng and Zeichner made two vaccines to test on pigs: one to protect against COVID-19 and another focused on a different coronavirus that affects pigs.
The doctors expected only the latter to work, but both did. The vaccines didn’t completely prevent infection, but protected the animals from developing severe symptoms. The fact that both variations of their vaccine worked shows that the method could help fend off any of the viruses in the family. That “was surprising but a very welcome result for us,” Zeichner said.
But it’s still a ways from the finish line. His team is now working with mice to hone the right proportions of the vaccine and how best to administer it. Then they’ll test it against COVID-19 in hamsters, and eventually scale up to humans.
“It’s a long way from 21 pigs to 2 billion people, but it’s a start,” he said.