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Proactive Vaccinology
Context:
New study in ‘Nature Nanotechnology’ introduces “proactive vaccinology”. Scientists create vaccines even before pathogens emerge and have seen results in mice.
More on News
- The vaccine, studied by Oxford, Cambridge, and Caltech.
- It trains the immune system to potentially prevent future pandemics from the bat-origin virus.
- The vaccine responses against different coronaviruses. Despite not being SARS-CoV-1, the vaccine produces immune responses against it.
Impacts
- Reactive campaigns respond to outbreaks, evaluating vaccine effectiveness, speed of implementation, and delay in achieving protection.
- Three scales of reactive campaigns: hospital-based, regional, and national, with each level targeting healthcare workers based on the occurrence of the first case.
About
- The Quartet Nanocage vaccine provide a nanomedicine solution to protect against new zoonotic diseases and protect against proactive pandemics.
- It trains the immune system to recognise common areas between different coronaviruses, potentially providing broad protection against future outbreaks.
Disease X
- It refers to a hypothetical disease that represents a serious international pandemic threat as identified by the World Health Organization (WHO).
- A name used to highlight the need to prepare against unknown pathogens that could cause pandemics in the future.
How Does the New Vaccine Work?
- Targeting Specific Regions: The vaccine targets eight coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2((the virus responsible for the COVID-19 outbreak) ) and a virus found in bats, which trains the immune system.
- Immune Response to Unknown Coronaviruses: The vaccine also produces immune responses against coronaviruses that are not presented in the vaccine and include viruses that have not yet been identified.
- Simplicity and Accelerated Development: Researchers suggest that the new all-in-one vaccine is simpler in design than others and is faster to move to clinical trials.