Canada’s single-dose Covid-19 vaccine ready for human trial

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TEMPO.CO, Jakarta – Vaccine A single-dose Covid-19 developed by researchers in Ottawa, Canada produced a strong and long-lasting immune response in mice and monkeys. The vaccine, which is based on the replicative viral strain, is now ready for clinical trials in humans.

Scientist John Bell, a senior at the Ottawa Hospital and author of the study, said the vaccine, known as TOH-Vac1, would be a new all-purpose tool. “This vaccine is also potentially important in the global fight against the Covid-19 pandemic and its variants,” he said in a report last week.

Vaccine TOH-Vac1 used an attenuated strain of vaccinia virus, which has been used in the global campaign to eradicate smallpox, an infectious disease that has killed and maimed people for thousands of years. This fashionable vaccine was a success against smallpox epidemics in the 1950s and 1960s.

The Vaccinia virus has also been used in hepatitis B vaccines. Bell, whose previous work has focused on harnessing the power of the virus to fight cancer, says a Covid-19 vaccine based on virus offers power, versatility and security.

“Viruses have been used to vaccinate people for years, so they have a good safety record,” said Bell, whose study was published recently in the journal Molecular Therapy.

Another good thing about these model vaccines – especially the self-replicating ones like this – is that they produce a much stronger immune response. “A single dose will give you long-term immunity.”

Stephen Boulton, a postdoctoral fellow working at the Ottawa Hospital Cancer Centre, was one of the researchers who helped understand and develop TOH-Vac1. According to him, when the pandemic hit, everyone wanted to help. “That’s why we got into science,” he said.

Boulton and his colleagues compared the effectiveness of two vaccines made from different strains of vaccinia virus. The replicated version was found to be more potent than the non-replicating version, producing three to four times more antibodies and activating more T cells.

Monkeys given the virus experienced no side effects other than mild swelling or sores at the injection site. In fact, protective antibody levels remained elevated six months later. When the vaccine enters the body, Bell continues, the weakened virus infects multiple host cells.

“The whole process of jumping from cell to cell produces an inflammatory response, which gives you a tremendous immune response,” Bell said, adding that the vaccine provides immunity by neutralizing the ability of SARS-CoV -2 to infect the host cells it needs to survive. and reproduce.

The initial vaccine research was funded by a grant from The Thistledown Foundation, a charity founded by Shopify founders and their wives, Tobi Lütke and Fiona McKean, as well as support from the Hospital Foundation. Ottawa and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. The research team is now seeking a $1 million research grant so the vaccine can move into human clinical trials.

According to Bell, TOH-Vac1 can prove very important in efforts to increase global vaccination rates because it is cheap, easy to manufacture and can be used for a wide variety of variants. As a vaccine platform, he said, the virus offers scientists great coding capacity, which means it can be genetically modified with a different protein from the coronavirus that causes Covid-19.

With this information, Bell said, the immune system could produce more of the antibodies and T cells needed to fight coronavirus infection, perhaps even one of the new variants. “You can actually target a completely invariant part of the virus, which doesn’t change,” Bell explained.

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