Promising developments in pursuit to design pan-coronavirus vaccine

Researchers at the Francis Crick Institute have shown that a specific area of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein is a promising target for a pan-coronavirus vaccine that could offer some protection against new virus variants, common colds, and help prepare for future pandemics. Developing a vaccine that provides protection against a number of different coronaviruses is a challenge because this family of viruses have many key differences, frequently mutate and generally induce incomplete protection against reinfection. This is why people can suffer repeatedly from common colds, and why it is possible to be infected multiple times with different variants of SARS-CoV-2. A pan-coronavirus vaccine would need to trigger antibodies that recognise and neutralise a range of coronaviruses, stopping the virus from entering hosts cells and replicating. In their study, published in Science Translational Medicine  (Wednesday 27 July), the researchers investigated whether antibodies that target the S2 subunit of SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein also neutralise other...