Penn State College of Medicine working on COVID-19 vaccine that can withstand variants

The most troublesome quality of COVID-19 has turned out to be its ability to mutate to evade human defenses.

That enables it to infect even people who have been vaccinated against COVID-19 or have immunity from being infected in the past.

But now scientists at Penn State College of Medicine say they are “one step closer” to developing a vaccine that might hold up against future mutations, also known as variants.

They are focusing on the COVID-19 spike protein, which enables the virus to enter human cells and cause sickness.

Existing vaccines target apart from the spike protein to trigger the antibodies that enable people to fight off the virus.

However, “mutations provide escape routes for the virus from neutralizing antibodies,” according to the researchers.

The researchers believe they may have found a way to close off the escape route.

“We identified areas of the spike protein that are least likely to mutate and used that information to engineer new proteins, which could be used to develop a vaccine that protects more broadly against not only future COVID-19 variants but potentially other related coronaviruses,” Nikolay Dokholyan, one of the researchers, said in a news release.

The researchers said they recently published their methods and results in, Advanced Functional Materials, a scientific journal.

They said “further studies will be done to optimize the design and immune response of the immunogens. Once perfected, they could someday be used as vaccine candidates in clinical trials.”

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