The world’s pressing need is for a vaccine to combat the current threat of COVID-19, but ultimately we might be able to develop a pancoronavirus vaccine , said Sunetra Gupta, professor of theoretical epidemiology at the University of Oxford, UK, at the annual research event of the European Commission.
On September 22, Professor Gupta spoke with other scientists on a digital panel at the European Research and Innovation Days to discuss how they are directing their cross-border research areas to address the challenges posed by the pandemic.
Professor Gupta said that her work for the past 25-30 years, focused on a theory about how pathogens evolve, particularly those that exist in multiple strains like flu, put her team in a good place to study the coronavirus.
His group has developed models to better understand the coronavirus from the limited data available , from how deadly it is – work that drew attention in the UK in March for suggesting lower death rates from infection – to determining the threshold of immunity. of the herd. They’re looking at how many people are likely to be immune and what seropositivity rates – where antibodies show up in the blood of people exposed to the coronavirus – can reveal.
His team is developing laboratory tests to look for antibodies to the coronavirus to study how many people have been exposed to the virus and also whether other coronaviruses confer protection against it.
Professor Gupta’s work on the evolution of flu antigens – substances that elicit an immune system response – has been key to her work with the coronavirus. His team devised a new way to make a vaccine that covers a diversity of strains by identifying flu epitopes , the part of antigens that stick to molecules, with limited variability.
“It’s like saying the flu can have many hats, but it only has four shirts,” he said. His technology has been licensed to develop a universal flu vaccine. Using the analogy above, coronaviruses have a more limited wardrobe.
“Each type of coronavirus sticks to its own closet,” Professor Gupta said. “You don’t have the luxury, like the flu, of saying, ‘Okay, I’ll wear the red shirt tomorrow.’ Can not do that. So it is quite useful to make a vaccine. “That is why I am confident that we will be able to produce a vaccine against this virus because it will not change suddenly and be antigenically very different . So, at that level, it’s a lot more like measles than the flu. “
Immunity
Unlike measles, lifelong immunity is unlikely. “With coronaviruses, you tend to lose your immunity and get reinfected every three or four years ,” Gupta said.
When it comes to epitopes of limited variability, the four currently circulating coronaviruses likely have some ‘clothing’ in common, Prof said. Gupta. “Each coronavirus has its own closet, but there are common parts that they share within their closets.”
Professor Gupta hopes that the channel they have established can be used in the future to make a pancoronavirus vaccine, she said. “It is something that we are pursuing very seriously.” But, he suggests, vaccine research is likely to get more difficult in the future.
“I always teach my students that the vaccines we have are the lowest hanging fruits in the vaccine tree. It is in them that we have been able to mimic natural immunity, “said Professor Gupta.” And they are also the ones that induce a very strong and long-lasting natural immunity, such as measles, mumps and rubella. “
Given the relatively short immune response of the coronavirus, he says what they want is a vaccine that provides enough immunity to prevent people from dying and helps the immune system keep them alive in the event of reinfection. “So I think that’s the goal.”
Global challenges
The annual research event, held from September 22 to 24, brought together scientists, policy makers, business people and members of the public and was based in Brussels, Belgium. The ERC panel was one of two to showcase the value of curiosity-driven fundamental research in responding to global challenges.
After the panel, Professor Balpreet Singh Ahluwalia, from the Arctic University of Norway, and the ERC fellow, told Horizon that researchers around the world are doing their part to tackle the pandemic. But for him, the crisis shows how cutting-edge research is able to adapt quickly to address problems . This kind of research is more important than ever, he says, and he hopes funding will not be cut.
“Border investigation does not prepare us for a problem. It prepares us for invisible problems, “he said, explaining that an application for research can only become apparent in the future.
His research focuses on affordable photon chip nanoscopy , in other words, he works on making super- resolution microscopes (capable of viewing things smaller than 200nm), while reducing cost.
Current super-resolution microscopes – the technology that won the Nobel Prize in 2014 – can cost around 500,000 euros and need to be housed in a special facility, while regular or fluorescence microscopes can take images at around 200nm and cost between 20,000. -50,000 euros, he said. And that’s not enough for the coronavirus, which is around 150 to 200nm.
When the pandemic hit, he and researchers from Norway and Germany collaborated on an open access microscope that would be small enough to use in a biosafety cabinet to make images or videos of the coronavirus. They combined a mobile phone-controlled laser-printed microscope with a super-resolution photonic chip to make a nanoscope that costs around $ 1,000. Prof. Ahluwalia said that his microscope is being used by researchers in Germany and could be used for diagnostics in the future. “The coronavirus has to be addressed globally, so a technology has to be priced that can be affordable globally.”
The blue sky investigation
In a panel of research and development days on September 23, the Nobel laureates and Kavli discussed the role of this type of basic research or blue sky call both in the current coronavirus response and in helping us prepare for an uncertain future. They spoke of the lack of data to understand the economic implications of the pandemic for the poorest in society , whether a big reset awaits us, and why the coronavirus shouldn’t overshadow other big challenges.
Kavli award winner and astronomer Professor Ewine van Dishoeck said that research is about going into the unknown, and this approach is important in training young scientists to be independent, creative thinkers.
Today’s major challenges, from climate change to pandemic, require us to step back and look at them from the systems level, he said. And fundamental discoveries and technologies are there to be developed through curious solution thinking, he said, citing how WiFi, for example, emerged from astronomy.
As science plays an increasingly visible role in our lives, Nobel laureate Sir Peter Ratcliffe wants frontier research to be more persuasive and for the general public to better understand how it works. For him, education is key to promoting scientific literacy within society in general, to understand how scientific knowledge is created and not suspect it.
“I would like to see a greater emphasis on history lessons, on teaching history through science, and on science lessons, teaching science through history,” he said. period, I think it would be much more persuasive to the general public in articulating how knowledge will be used in an unexpected way to create valuable new knowledge. I think that’s the most important point we have to get across. “
Artículo original
This article was originally published in Horizon, the EU Research and Innovation Magazine
