A promising vaccine approach to induce longer-lasting protective immunity against COVID-19

A scientific team from the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine at the National University of Singapore (NUS Medicine) and Monash University has engineered a COVID-19 vaccine that induced – in pre-clinical models – very long-lasting, protective immunity against SARS-CoV-2 virus with a single-shot immunisation. In an on-going, four-year collaboration, the team leveraged a novel vaccine platform to fuse the receptor-binding domain (RBD) from the spike protein of the SARS-CoV-2 virus to the Clec9A antibody. The Clec9A antibody targets a specific subset of dendritic cells, a specialised type of immune cells found in tissues such as the skin, which are responsible for initiating immune responses in our body. Upon a single shot immunisation of the Clec9A-RBD antibody construct, the team monitored the immune responses in pre-clinical models over 21 months, and found no signs of declined immunity. In contrast, it observed that the quality of the immune response (the neutralising antibody response,...