Version 2.0 of Oxford vaccine to combat more deadly CoViD variants will be ready by autumn
The collaboration between Oxford University and Astra Zeneca are working on a revised vaccine to tackle more contagious and more deadly Coronavirus variants.
A paper by the UK's New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (NERVTAG) suggests that the UK CoViD variant, first discovered in South East England in September, may be between 40 and 70 per cent more infectious and at least 30% more deadly. A technical briefing from Public Health England (PHE) this week suggested the case fatality rate for the new variant may be 65 per cent higher than the original virus. This may be because a change in its spike protein, which allows the virus to get into human cells, may be more effective at binding to the cell receptor. This make the virus more ”sticky” to the cell it is trying to infect.
Sir Patrick Vallance, the chief scientific adviser to the British Government said "it may be that it binds more solidly to the receptor for the virus and gets into cells more easily as a result. It may be that it grows more readily in certain cell types. Those are things that people are looking at and more information will come. What we can conclude is that there must be some mechanism by which it can actually bind or enter cells somehow."
More worryingly, another paper by the University of Exeter went even further and suggested that the new UK strain might increase mortality by 91 per cent.
Sir Patrick was reassuringly confident that current vaccines will still protect against the variant, with increasing evidence that those who were infected against the first strain appeared to show immunity to the new one. But he said the same could not be said about mutations from South Africa and Brazil variants, which are causing alarm in Government.
Matt Hancock, the British Health Secretary, raised fears in a recent televised briefing that the South African strain may make current vaccines 50 per cent less effective. However, Sir Patrick Vallance played down Mr Hancock's concerns and said it was "too early" to know what effect the strain would have on the vaccination.
Nevertheless, the speed with which the virus can mutate leaves no room for complacency. Work has already started to create new versions of the vaccine to combat the new variants as they emerge. Professor Andrew Pollard, the leader of the Oxford University vaccine group, said it is far easier to modify the vaccine than to start again from scratch. "The actual work on designing a new vaccine is very quick because it's essentially just switching out the spike protein for the update variants, so all of this can be completed in a short period of time," he said. "The process for editing a slight change to the vaccine is a really short process in comparison to the huge efforts last year to run very large-scale trials. These are really like very small trials that can be run quickly."
Mene Pangalos, the executive vice-president of biopharmaceuticals research and development at AstraZeneca, said he wanted to produce the updated vaccine as "rapidly as possible". He said "we're working very hard and we're already talking about not just the variants that we have to make in laboratories but also the clinical studies that we need to run, and we're very much aiming to try and have something ready by the autumn. Our ambition is that it will be ready for the next round of immunisations as we go into next winter."
Oxford University and Astra Zeneca have pledged to provide 3 billion CoViD vaccines, at no profit, to help inoculate the world.
This new development also raises the possibility of UK residents getting a third dose of a vaccine in the Autumn, at the same time the British National Health Service rolls out its annual ‘flu vaccines.
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