EC Microbiology

Editorial Volume 20 Issue 10 - 2024

Computational Designs for Vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 Variants

Attapon Cheepsattayakorn1,2,3,4*, Ruangrong Cheepsattayakorn5 and Porntep Siriwanarangsun1

1Faculty of Medicine, Western University, Pathumtani Province, Thailand

2Faculty of Medicine Vajira Hospital, Navamindradhiraj University, Bangkok, Thailand

310th Zonal Tuberculosis and Chest Disease Center, Chiang Mai, Thailand

4Department of Disease Control, Ministry of Public Health, Thailand

5Department of Pathology, Faculty of Medicine, Chiang Mai University, Chiang Mai, Thailand

*Corresponding Author: Attapon Cheepsattayakorn, 10th Zonal Tuberculosis and Chest Disease Center, Chiang Mai, Thailand.
Received: October 09, 2024; Published: October 11, 2024




All vaccines, such as mRNA-1273 (Moderna), BNT162b2 (Pfizer/BioNTech), and Ad.26.COV2.S (Janssen) are based on the sequence of the original Wuhan-Hu-1 strain of the spike fusion glycoprotein (S) and are engineered to remain in the prefusion state, which is the primary target of neutralizing antibodies (nAbs) [1]. However, the efficacies of these first-generation vaccines are diminished against newly circulating variants of concern (VoCs) such as Alpha (B.1.1.7), Beta (B.1.351), Delta (B.1.617.2), and Omicron (BA.1, BA.2, BA.4/5, XBB, and BQ.1.1), which evade nAbs due to mutations in the S protein [2-9]. Although booster vaccines have been developed to match S protein sequences of circulating SARS-CoV-2 variants [10-13], there is no guarantee that these updated vaccines will protect against future strains of the virus [7,8,14-16].

  1. Vishwanath S., et al. “Computationally designed Spike antigens induce neutralising responses against the breadth of SARS-COV-2 variants”. NPJ Vaccines1 (2024): 164.
  2. Carabelli AM., et al. “SARS-CoV-2 variant biology: immune escape, transmission and fitness”. Nature Reviews Microbiology 3 (2023): 162-177.
  3. Tan CCS., et al. “Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from humans to animals and potential host adaptation”. Nature Communications 1 (2022): 2988.
  4. Bradley Pickering., et al. “Divergent SARS-CoV-2 variant emerges in white-tailed deer with deer-to-human transmission”. Nature Microbiology12 (2022): 2011-2024.
  5. Porter AF., et al. “Evolutionary rate of SARS-CoV-2 increases during zoonotic infection of farmed mink”. Virus Evolution1 (2023): vead002.
  6. Starr TN., et al. “Deep Mutational Scanning of SARS-CoV-2 Receptor Binding Domain Reveals Constraints on Folding and ACE2 Binding”. Cell5 (2020): 1295-1310.e20.
  7. Markov PV., et al. “The evolution of SARS-CoV-2”. Nature Reviews Microbiology 6 (2023): 361-379.
  8. Qu P., et al. “Neutralization of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron BA.4/5 and BA.2.12.1 Subvariants”. New England Journal of Medicine 386 (2022): 2526-2528.
  9. Hu J., et al. “Increased immune escape of the new SARS-CoV-2 variant of concern Omicron”. Cellular and Molecular Immunology 2 (2022): 293-295.
  10. Lewnard JA., et al. “Association of SARS-CoV-2 BA.4/BA.5 Omicron lineages with immune escape and clinical outcome”. Nature Communications 1 (2023): 1407.
  11. Chalkias S., et al. “A Bivalent Omicron-Containing Booster Vaccine against Covid-19”. New England Journal of Medicine14 (2022): 1279-1291.
  12. Collier AY., et al. “Immunogenicity of BA.5 Bivalent mRNA Vaccine Boosters”. New England Journal of Medicine 6 (2023): 565-567.
  13. Offit PA. “Bivalent Covid-19 Vaccines — A Cautionary Tale”. New England Journal of Medicine 16 (2023): 481-483.
  14. Krammer F. “The human antibody response to influenza A virus infection and vaccination”. Nature Reviews Immunology 6 (2019): 383-397.
  15. Vita R., et al. “The Immune Epitope Database (IEDB): 2018 update”. Nucleic Acids Research D1 (2019): D339-D343.
  16. Lu S., et al. “The immunodominant and neutralization linear epitopes for SARS-CoV-2”. Cell Reports 4 (2021): 108666.
  17. Schrödinger L and DeLano W. PyMOL (2020).
  18. Nutalai R., et al. “Potent cross-reactive antibodies following Omicron breakthrough in vaccinees”. Cell12 (2022): 2116-2131.e18.
  19. Theodora UJ Bruuna., et al. “Engineering a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine targeting the RBD cryptic-face via immunofocusing”. bioRxiv preprint (2024).

Attapon Cheepsattayakorn., et al. “Computational Designs for Vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 Variants”. EC Microbiology  20.10 (2024): 01-06.

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