Scientists at the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford, and Caltech in the U.S. are developing a novel approach called "proactive vaccinology", to fight viruses which have not yet emerged.
The vaccine, made from a combination of harmless proteins from different viruses and nanoparticles, is injected into the body to prepare it against any future virus invasion.
"Our focus is to create a vaccine that will protect us against the next coronavirus pandemic, and have it ready before the pandemic has even started," said Rory Hills, a graduate researcher in the University of Cambridge's Department of Pharmacology and first author of the report.
He continued, "We've created a vaccine that provides protection against a broad range of different coronaviruses - including ones we don't even know about yet."
The report published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, argued that since the vaccine is trained to target proteins, it can easily tackle any known or unknown virus.
"We've shown that a relatively simple vaccine can still provide a scattershot response across a range of different viruses," said Hills. "It takes us one step forward towards our goal of creating vaccines before a pandemic has even started."
During the trial in mice, the vaccine showed a broad response to Covid viruses, including Sars-CoV-1 virus, even though it was not added to the nanoparticles.
Scientists noted that after the vaccine is approved for human use, it could be taken as a Covid booster.
Hills added that the vaccine could be made in existing facilities for microbial fermentation. Also, the nanoparticles and viral proteins could be manufactured separately in different places and later mixed together whenever the need arises.
Prof Mark Howarth, a senior author of the study, commented, "Scientists did a great job in quickly producing an extremely effective Covid vaccine during the last pandemic, but the world still had a massive crisis with a huge number of deaths. We need to work out how we can do even better than that in the future, and a powerful component of that is starting to build the vaccines in advance."
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