The encouraging findings of recent preclinical trials for a novel, broad-spectrum COVID-19 vaccine have now been published in Cell. The vaccine candidate was produced using microbial hosts designed by engineering biology specialist, Ingenza, and shows great potential for aiding pandemic preparedness.
Many COVID-19 vaccines work by presenting fragments of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein – the receptor-binding domain (RBD) – to the body to generate an immune response. However, newly arising SARS-CoV-2 variants are able to evade this response by mutating the changeable regions of their RBDs. This means that existing vaccines may not be as effective at protecting against the disease as they once were.
A consortium comprising Ingenza, Caltech, the University of Oxford and the Centre for Process Innovation therefore initiated a pioneering project to advance Caltech’s original mosaic-8b vaccine candidate, which includes RBDs from SARS-CoV-2 and seven other coronaviruses. The conserved regions of these RBDs should be present and unchanged in other sarbecoviruses, as well as novel variants of SARS-CoV-2 that may emerge in the future.
Ingenza transferred vaccine candidate production from mammalian cells to microbial platforms, enabling reductions in the time and cost required for product development. The company achieved this through its proprietary inGenius™ platform, which was used to design custom Pichia pastoris and Bacillus subtilis strains, plus the associated scalable bioprocesses and analytical methods for the transfer.
The first round of preclinical trials for this revolutionary new vaccine began in 2022 and detailed findings of these studies have now been published, which support the use of the mosaic-8b vaccine as a broad, cross-reactive and long-lasting immunisation strategy against known and undiscovered sarbecoviruses.
For more information, visit www.ingenza.com.
