Developing an infection-blocking pan-coronavirus vaccine

Viruses run a highly competitive race to outpace our immune system and establish infection. Our immune responses can't usually expand fast enough to win the race so are unable to prevent viruses spreading amongst our cells and being transmitted on to others. Therefore, it is essential to train our immune systems with more effective vaccines to allow them to shutdown viruses before they gain a foothold, both within an individual and at a population level. In the last 20 years, there have been 3 global pandemics caused by coronaviruses passing from animals to humans: SARS, MERS and COVID-19. Even the accelerated development of vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 was not fast enough to prevent worldwide spread of the virus, with devastating morbidity and mortality. Existing vaccines have become less effective at preventing infection because they target the spike protein that rapidly mutated to escape immunity; making new vaccines against the latest variant means we will always be a step behind the virus. As a crucial component of proactive pandemic preparedness, we are therefore developing a pan-coronavirus vaccine with the capacity to provide broad protection against new animal coronaviruses spreading into humans, as well as against current and future, potentially more lethal, SARS-CoV-2 variants. Our vaccine, 'PanCoVax', will generate immunity that targets regions that are essential for virus replication. We found these regions to be highly conserved across all variants and also all versions of coronaviruses in the animal kingdom. Our vaccine will therefore be 'future variant proof' and offer protection against pandemics from new coronaviruses transmitted from animals. Another limitation of existing SARS-CoV-2 vaccines is that they do not induce immunity able to shut down the virus before it multiplies and can be transmitted on to others. However, PanCoVax mimics a type of immune response we observed in a subset of individuals who were able to 'abort' SARS-CoV-2 so rapidly...