COVID Vaccines - search results

Over time people will inevitably get tired of needing two or three booster shots a year. Vaccine uptake will dwindle and we will be back to square one. We are already seeing this happen, with only around 10% of the US population having opted to get the latest bivalent booster.

Early results show engineered red blood cells can help create immunity against SARS-CoV-2 and treat COVID-19 by stimulating antibody production with minimal adverse effects.

Researchers have found that patients with cancer who receive chemotherapy, and some targeted therapies including CDK4/6 inhibitors and therapies targeted at B cells, may mount an inadequate immune response to COVID-19 vaccination.

COVID-19 vaccines that also target another viral protein, the RNA polymerase that coronaviruses use to make copies of themselves, could help new vaccines offer longer-lasting protection, according to UCLA research.

A new NIH-funded Phase II study will assess if people who are already highly allergic, or have a mast cell disorder, are at increased risk of an immediate systemic reaction after being given either the Moderna or Pfizer/BioNtech COVID-19 mRNA vaccines.

Since the start of the pandemic, mRNA vaccine development to combat COVID-19 has happened extremely quickly, but can these scientific advances can have a positive impact on the development of cancer vaccines? The technology is definitely at a good point right now, but the choice of the right antigen or antigens to target seems key to getting cancer targeting mRNA vaccines to the clinic. At present the most developed of these vaccines are still at Phase II, so it remains to be seen which will be the first to succeed.

Recent results suggest that the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine has good efficacy against the new UK and South African variants. But the AstraZeneca/Oxford University vaccine appears less effective against the South African variant, a trend emerging for several approved or near-approved vaccines.

The new machine-learning model, DeepVacPred, can accomplish vaccine design cycles that took months or years in minutes or seconds, according to its designers, researchers at the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering. In their study, they used their model to design a multi-epitope vaccine against SARS-CoV-2.

Merck acted after reviewing data from Phase I trials for its candidates V590 and V591. Both vaccines were generally well tolerated, but generated immune responses “inferior to those seen following natural infection and those reported for other SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 vaccines,” the company said.

The partnership will be coordinated by the FNIH, which will work with the government agencies and members of the pharmaceutical industry partners, to provide infrastructure, subject matter expertise and/or funding (both new and in-kind) as a means to advance the most promising vaccines and therapeutic candidates into clinical trials.