Researchers at MIT and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center have developed a new COVID-19 vaccine that they hope will ultimately serve as a viable option for vaccinating much of the developing world, where access to current vaccines has been limited.
Results from animal tests, which were published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, showed the vaccine produced a strong immune response in macaques. The Serum Institute of India, the world's largest manufacturer of vaccines, is a research partner on the paper, and is currently leading human clinical trials in Africa.
This new vaccine is not based on the mRNA technology used by Pfizer and Moderna, which requires storage in extremely cold temperatures and has made transportation and distribution challenging in much of the developing world. The Boston-area scientists behind this new vaccine say it would not have that same limitation.
"This is a technology that is well-established and has a strong track record of safety," said Chris Love of MIT and the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, who is one of the paper's senior authors. "But perhaps importantly, it's also one that could be manufactured very inexpensively and ultimately, if formulated properly, can reduce some of the cold chain requirements and other challenges of distributing some of the other new technologies for vaccines that we've been seeing."
"We still have an important need for low-cost vaccines that are very stable for hard-to-reach places in the developing world," said Dr. Dan Barouch, director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, who was also a senior author on the paper. Barouch's research was also central to the development of Johnson & Johnson's COVID-19 vaccine, which also uses a technology other than mRNA.
"I think both [J&J and the new vaccine] present a good alternative to the mRNA vaccines," Barouch told GBH News. The initial research on the new vaccine in macaques showed a comparable response to the J&J vaccine.
According to a project at the University of Oxford that's tracking global vaccination rates, over 63 percent of the world's population has received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, but just 14 percent of people in low-income countries have gotten at least one dose. In a push to expand access, protesters have called for Moderna and other vaccine companies to make the technology behind its COVID-19 vaccine available for production by other companies around the globe.
The new vaccine's development began in early 2020. The technology used is called a "protein-based subunit vaccine," and involves fragments of the COVID-19 spike protein spread around a virus-like particle that serves as a "scaffold."
Love said production facilities around the world already have the ability to produce vaccines using this type of technology.
"You can imagine this ball with little proteins stuck on the outside of it," Love said. "And this kind of looks like a virus, but it's not. It doesn't replicate. It's only protein. And all of the parts of it are manufactured in yeast organisms. And you can kind of imagine the same way that beer is brewed, the yeast organisms can be a very efficient way to affordably produce the subunits required in this vaccine."
Also, he said, the virus particles used in the vaccine might be swapped out in the future for slightly different particles, allowing for a vaccine that could target newly emerging variants.
