A universal vaccine for Covid....

imhotep

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  • Mar 29, 2017
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    Some of you may have read my post about a "Universal Flu Vaccine" on the 18th December... Pls read it if you haven't.
    https://elakiri.com/threads/univers...g-results-with-possible-reality-soon.1967427/

    I did mention here several times that there's a major flaw in all the Covid vaccines - which is targeting of the Spike protein. The Wuhan Virus keeps on changing it's outer coat, creating variants, which in turn affects the efficacy of the vaccines which were developed with the sequence of the original strain.
    Also I mentioned that several vaccine developers are moving into Generation 2 vaccines, dropping the S- protein and trying to target something else that doesn't change with the variants. There are a couple of teams who uses different approaches and I will briefly mention one of them that had done animal trials.

    The development of a universal vaccine is not an easy task. All coronaviruses use what's known as trimeric Type I fusion proteins to bind and enter host cells. The S protein is cleaved into two parts called S1 and S2. The S1 part is the Receptor Binding Domain (RBD) and that's the one that locks into the ACE2 receptors. The S2 part includes a "Fusion Peptide" (FP) which allows the virus to fuse into our cell membranes. The FP part on S2 does not change across the whole Coronaviridae family. It stays 93% the same across ALL the coronaviruses.
    The new vaccine targets this FP and even if the virus can bind into the ACE2 receptor, it cannot fuse with the cell membranes, thus making it ineffective. Note that across all the variants the FP remains the same and thus the vaccine is variant independent. The same vaccine will work across all the variants.

    The implentation of the vaccine is fairly complex and uses a simple inactivated e-coli bacteria (A killed whole cell bacerial vaccine). The current gene technology enable to make the e-coli to be modified to act as an auto transporter.
    These type of vaccines are easy to store, very cheap to manufacture and can quickly manufactured and highly safe to use. This is quite similar to the pertussis (Whooping cough) vaccine.

    Early results with piglets show that the vaccine is effective (even though they were infected to a certain degree) and it's still in early stages of development. Hopefully these vaccines will provide us with better immunity against future variants.

    PS: There are other teams who also target the FP but use alternate methods - also in early development.
     
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    Bad_horse

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  • Apr 23, 2021
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    These type of vaccines are easy to store, very cheap to manufacture and can quickly manufactured and highly safe to use. This is quite similar to the pertussis (Whooping cough) vaccine.
    Somewhat different to pertussis vaccine noh? Pertussis vaccine is just inactvated Bordetella purtussis which will directly act as a antigen to the same disease; where this vaccine will be used for a different disease using a different organism. E.coli will use its cell wall to express fusion peptide which will act as a antigen. I don't think this method has been used before
     

    imhotep

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  • Mar 29, 2017
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    Somewhat different to pertussis vaccine noh? Pertussis vaccine is just inactvated Bordetella purtussis which will directly act as a antigen to the same disease; where this vaccine will be used for a different disease using a different organism. E.coli will use its cell wall to express fusion peptide which will act as a antigen. I don't think this method has been used before
    Good observation... (y) It's a completely different approach. That's why I wrote "implementation is fairly complex". To many in this forum it will be useless information and for me to explain is not easy either. This scheme is not possible at all without the help of current gene technology. This is how they did it, as concise and as basic as possible.

    These scientists started off from the work done by a team of Tokyo University researchers. The Japanese made systematic set of deletions in the E. coli genome and showed that they can delete 29.7% of the genome, yet retain a viable, albeit slow growing organism. The base of the vaccine is this modified E coli organism. Hence the platform belongs to the Japanese.
    Then the US scientists designed a "plasmid" with a derived "AT expression cassette". This cassette is inserted to the E coli bacteria and the bacteria will happily transport it across. Bacterias do this quite often. This inserted cassette makes the bacteria to do a "surface expression" of the Covid fusion proteins.
    They used two types to test- one from Covid-19 (Beta Coronavirus) and another from PEDV (Alpha Coronavirus - Porcine Epidemic Diarrhoea Virus) - This is because the pig is the closest to us next to the non-human primates. The end result is that these modified E Coli will develop the Covid FP and the Porcine version of the FP on on it's surface. It's no a simple task, but this team was successful in achieving it.

    When these bacteria gets injected, our body immune system will finally get rid of them, but in the interim our immune system will also identify the Covid FP that are carried by the E coli, and develop antibodies for it. If the vaccine is able to raise enough immune response hopefully, it's going to work. As I mentioned earlier the FP remains the same across the whole Coronaviridae line and hence it will work for any variant.

    PS: When we blindly go behind snake-oil concoctions and try to invoke various deities across the Universe against the Coronavirus, it's fascinating how these scientists use their logical thinking and using appropriate "science" to devise and explore hitherto unknown methods to combat it.:)