COVID-19 vaccines are due for an upgrade, scientists say, but emerging variants and fickle immune reactions mean it’s not clear what new jabs should look like.
Vaccines might become more effective if they target newer variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, not just the original one.As countries brace for another Omicron wave driven by the variants BA.4 and BA.5, calls to update COVID-19 vaccines are growing louder.
Many — although by no means all — scientists agree that COVID-19 vaccines are overdue for change. But constantly emerging variants and hard-to-predict immune responses mean that it’s far from clear what the new jabs ought to look like. It is also possible — and some scientists say likely — that an entirely new variant will pop up from a distant part of the SARS-CoV-2 family tree. “My concern is that there’s this huge focus on Omicron, and the assumption that Omicron is what we will be dealing with in the future,” says Penny Moore, a virologist at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. “We have a strong track record of getting that wrong.
Other vaccine manufacturers, including Pfizer of New York City and its collaborator BioNTech of Mainz, Germany, as well as Novavax of Gaithersburg, Maryland, are testing their own Omicron-based vaccines. In a 25 June press release, Pfizer-BioNTech reported that an Omicron BA.1-only vaccine generated a neutralizing antibody responses against BA.1 that were around 2 to 3 times more potent than an extra dose of the original vaccine; their bivalent vaccine, similar to Moderna's, generated BA.
Beigel and his colleagues will soon report the first results from a NIAID-funded trial that is testing combinations of vaccines based on a range of variants, including Omicron, Beta, Delta and the original strain. This trial, called COVAIL, includes mRNA vaccines manufactured by Moderna and Pfizer–BioNTech, as well as an experimental protein-based booster developed by Sanofi in Paris and GSK in London.
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