Singapore scientists pursue booster vaccine to counter Covid-19 variants, other coronaviruses
- A study found that Sars survivors fully vaccinated with Pfizer-BioNTech developed antibodies that could neutralise variants and other coronaviruses that could be contracted by humans
- Scientists say this could be the basis of a booster vaccine to control the current pandemic and prevent the next one, and want to recruit more Sars survivors for their research
Professor Wang Linfa from the Duke-NUS emerging infectious diseases programme, one of the study’s authors, said the findings were key for the development of next-generation vaccines that would not only help with controlling the current pandemic “but may also prevent or reduce the risk of future pandemics caused by related viruses”.
Before receiving Covid-19 vaccinations, the Sars survivors only had antibodies against the disease they recovered from. The Sars-CoV-1 virus that causes Sars shares an overall genome sequence identity of almost 80 per cent with the Sars-CoV-2 virus causing the Covid-19 disease.
Wang said the “eureka moment” during the study came when those who had recovered from Sars and were jabbed with the Pfizer vaccine showed uniform high-level cross-neutralising antibodies against 10 different sarbecoviruses. These are a subgroup of coronaviruses – including the ones that caused Sars and Covid-19 – with the potential to jump from animals to humans and potentially start the next pandemic.
By comparison, those who had never been ill with Sars or Covid-19 and were vaccinated against the latter showed antibodies against the virus that causes Sars, but the levels were “not good enough”, Wang said. Those who recovered from Covid-19 had higher levels of antibodies after getting jabbed than those who had not contracted either disease, but their Sars antibodies were still not very high.
