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The crux of the vaccine technology: This new vaccine (R21) uses a circumsporozoite protein (CSP) antigen – that’s a highly conserved protein of the parasite, i
by perardi 6y ago
The crux of the vaccine technology:
This new vaccine (R21) uses a circumsporozoite protein (CSP) antigen – that’s a highly conserved protein of the parasite, involved in several functions as the parasite makes the move from mosquito to human and into different human tissues such as the salivary glands. This has been a vaccine ingredient before, such as in the RTS,S vaccine (the first one ever licensed), but R21 has a much higher proportion of CSP assembled into a virus-like particle. It also uses the exact same adjuvant from Novavax (Matrix-M) that they are using in their coronavirus vaccine – you can’t keep a good adjuvant down, and this Chilean-soapbark-based one seems to really kick the immune system up under all circumstances.
Great to see we are managing to develop new vaccine platforms.
- pradn 6y ago"Chilean-soapbark"! Happy to see an ingredient such as this. One more reason to conserve biodiversity is for useful ingredients like this one.
- interestica 6y agoI had the same reaction: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/10/single-tree-species-may-hold-key-coronavirus-vaccine/616792/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/10/single-t...
- DoreenMichele 6y agoI'm guessing this is likely a large part of why the efficacy is so high. From what I gather, parasitic infections are hard to vaccinate against at least in part because at least some of them routinely change their protein markers, so it's hard to identify them. It sounds to me like this counters that.
- interestica 6y ago> adjuvant > Chilean-soapbark More on this: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/10/single-tree-species-may-hold-key-coronavirus-vaccine/616792/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/10/single-t...
- omegaworks 6y agoA fantastic article. Thanks for sharing this.