A highly multi-disciplinary team of bioengineers, materials-scientists and immunologists at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University (Boston, MA, USA) has developed a broadly deployable biomaterials-based infection vaccine technology called OMNIVAX to confront the many challenges that infectious diseases pose to mankind head-on.

The vaccine platform approach is rooted in the idea that antigens, when they are incorporated together with immune-activating adjuvants in a longer-lived biomaterial scaffold that concentrates immune cells at the site of vaccination, can be presented to the immune system in a more controlled and sustained way than when merely provided transiently in soluble form. As a result of this, the immune system’s protective responses can be more effective and prolonged.

Using OMNIVAX’s fast and effective vaccine strategy, the team created a collection of vaccines against the COVID-19-causing SARS-CoV-2 virus. Taking advantage of the modular nature of the OMNIVAX approach, the Wyss team generated their SARS-CoV-2 vaccines incorporating different combinations of viral antigens in combination with a general immune-activating adjuvant. After receiving virus-specific antigens, it took the team merely three days to complete vaccines that were ready for injection. A single injection of the vaccines into mice stimulated the rapid production of significant levels of antibodies that were specific to the viral antigens, and maintained for at least 96 days. In addition, the researchers analyzed blood sera from the vaccinated animals, the liquid component of blood which contains antibodies previously made by the immune system’s B cells like, in this case, SARS-CoV-2-directed antibodies. In in vitro neutralization assays, the sera could prevent the infection of cultured cells by a SARS-CoV-2 pseudovirus, which is commonly used in coronavirus research as a key step to analyze the protective function of a vaccine.

The team is currently pursuing studies in which they aim to protect animal models that are challenged with the actual coronavirus to confirm the efficacy of the vaccines. Besides these first promising observations on the COVID-19 OMNIVAX vaccines, the team’s new approach could also provide protective solutions for many common unmet infectious diseases that have been threatening people in different environments.

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Wyss Institute