Quote:
Originally Posted by Sephiroth
If I may, I'd like to re-ask a question that's lost in the backlog.
Does anyone know whether or not the vaccines will protect against any coronavirus, given that it is the spike mechanism being targeted?
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Difficult question! Some parts of the spike will give a better immune response than others. But, some parts of the spike differ by more than other parts. As an example, this paper -
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7166309/ compares the spike of SARS-COV-2 (COVID) and SARS-COV (SARS) Super techie paper but check out figure 1(a) which shows different parts of the spike and how similar they are to each other. It varies between being 100% identical and 51%.
We really want to raise antibodies against the receptor binding domain (RBD) as this will not only get the immune system to recognise and destroy the virus but also, as a bonus, stop the virus from binding and entering cells. The RBD is only 74% similar so there’s a chance the COVID vaccine might not protect against SARS.
One huge advantage of the new vaccine types such as the mRNA vaccines and the Oxford/AZ vaccine is that they are ‘platform’ vaccines where you can very easily drop in a new RNA or DNA sequence to create a new vaccine. We are talking a couple of days here plus efficacy testing.