Using Nanoparticles as Vaccines
We, as lay people, have learnt -the hard way- that viruses change their shape to avoid our immune system weaponry. The Covid-19 variants, Alpha, Beta, Delta, Omicron… is a point in case, possibly the one that has draw our attention to this nasty habit of viruses. However, well before Covid-19, we were familiar with the need to get a flu vaccine shot every year, since the previous one was no longer working as the flu virus keeps changing.
Therefore it is a good news the one reported by the MIT Tech Review of a new approach being investigated by a team of researchers to create a vaccine that can resist viruses variations.
They are using synthetic biology, that is they create artificial molecules resembling biological ones. They have created a nanoparticle sphere-shaped and glued on its surface 8 types of tips of the spike protein found in 8 Covid-19 variants. Their hope was that this would stimulate the immune system to create antibodies able to defend from all those variants. The first experiments (with mice) shows that this is indeed the case and even better it shows that the immune systems acquires the capability to produce antibodies that can protect against other variants.
The reason of this “over-performance” is that some parts of the spike protein remains unchanged as viruses mutate, thus stimulating the immune system with several spike variants that common part is generating antibodies that can fight other types.
