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Yeah, this is not great news. I hope the vaccine makers are looking at adding coverage for these variants to the existing vaccines. That should be relatively ea

Yeah, this is not great news. I hope the vaccine makers are looking at adding coverage for these variants to the existing vaccines. That should be relatively easy to do for the mRNA vaccines, but possibly harder for the adenovirus based vaccines like the Oxford/AZ and the J&J. The question is whether they would have to go through a full phase 3 trial for this kind of addition or would this be more like how we add coverage to different flu viruses to the annual flu vaccines?

ashtonbaker 6y ago
> That should be relatively easy to do for the mRNA vaccines That isn't super obvious to me anymore, after it was pointed out to me that the current mRNA vaccines rely on a modified sequence for the spike protein, designed to make the protein stable enough to be usable in the vaccine process (described here [1] as "antigen S-2P" - "S" for "Spike" and "2P" for the two proline substitutions in the sequence). It's my understanding that this work dates to 2017 [2], and that it might not be quick or easy to replicate for new spike protein variants. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41577-020-00480-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41577-020-00480-0 [2] Pallesen, J. et al. Immunogenicity and structures of a rationally designed prefusion MERS-CoV spike antigen. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 114, E7348–E7357 (2017).