New study boosts hopes for a broad vaccine to combat COVID-19 variants and future coronavirus outbreaks

Scientists from Duke-NUS Medical School and the National Centre for Infectious Diseases (NCID) found that 2003 SARS survivors who have been vaccinated with the Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA vaccine produced highly potent functional antibodies that are capable of neutralising not only all known SARS-CoV-2 variants of concerns (VOCs) but also other animal coronaviruses that have the potential to cause human infection. This finding, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, is the first time that such cross-neutralising reactivity has been demonstrated in humans, and further boosts hopes of developing an effective and broad-spectrum next-generation vaccine against different coronaviruses. Among the coronavirus family, one sub-group relies on the ACE2 molecule to enter human cells. Both SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 belong to this group as well as a number of coronaviruses circulating in animals such as bats, pangolins and civets. While the exact route of transmission remains unknown, these viruses have the potential to jump...