Buoyed by the fact that their vaccine is relatively easy to update, scientists at Oxford University are modifying it in a pre-emptive strike to prevent new coronavirus variants, including the variant first discovered in South Africa, from taking hold. CBS News quotes chief designer Professor Sarah Gilbert as saying that her team has already been working for months on modifying their vaccine to tackle new variants of the coronavirus and expects to have a new version ready in the fall.
The ability to turn on a dime is down to the "plug and play" platform used in the original Oxford vaccine, Gilbert said.
"You decide what antigen you want to use from the virus you want to make a vaccine against, exactly which version of it, and then you just slot it in and you make your vaccine," she said.
She also stressed that, because Oxford has its own biomanufacturing facility on campus, modifications can be fast-tracked. "We've established our pipeline," she said. "We make the first seed of stock of the vaccine in the manufacturing facility in Oxford. That's just a few minutes away from here on campus."
Gilbert said that a modified vaccine – to take on not just the South African variant, but a number of variants of concern – could be rolled out in the US in a matter of months.
CBS News reports that even before modification, Oxford scientists say their vaccine is highly effective in tackling the runaway variant first discovered in the UK. Real-life preliminary data shows that it kept hospitalisations down by 94%, even outperforming the Pfizer vaccine.
"We've seen the first widespread use of a vaccine in a setting where there's been a new variant that's emerged," Oxford Vaccine Group head Andrew Pollard said in the report. "The vaccine has an impact against that variant. That is astonishing."
Part of the reason for that success is the 12-week gap between shots in the UK, rather than the four-week programme currently standard in the US, Pollard said.
"If you give that vaccine to many, many more people as the first dose, that ends hospitalisation and deaths immediately, while if you give two doses close together, you'll be selfishly giving those two doses to half the number of people, slowing down that rollout and the protection of the population," Pollard said.
[link url="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-variants-vaccine-oxford-astrazeneca-fda/"]Full CBS News report (Open access)[/link]