Australias first mRNA Covid vaccine candidate could solve immune imprinting problem heres what that could mean

Researchers developing Australia’s first mRNA Covid vaccine say they may have solved the “immune imprinting” issue that has contributed to the declining effectiveness of boosters as the virus mutates.Immune imprinting, also known as original antigenic sin, occurs when the body’s original immune response to a virus — either from vaccination or infection — becomes less effective against new variants of the same virus.The Australian-based vaccine candidate, being developed by the Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences (MIPS) in collaboration with the Doherty Institute, aims to tackle the problem by encoding the proteins on the surface of the receptor-binding domain — the tip of the virus ‘spike’.In a preclinical study, published in Molecular Therapy Methods and Clinical Development, the researchers tested their mRNA ‘membrane-anchored receptor-binding domain’ (mRNA RBD-TM) vaccine against ancestral Covid vaccines by comparing third-dose immune responses to Omicron variants in mice.The study showed a 16.3-fold increase in antibodies for the mRNA RBD-TM vaccine compared with 1.3 for the ancestral vaccine, despite previous exposure to the SARS-CoV-2 virus, suggesting the potential to overcome immune imprinting.“The concept of immune imprinting is not a new one — the same phenomenon occurs with influenza, and there is now mounting evidence of widespread imprinting attributed to exposure to ancestral Covid-19 strains,” Professor Colin Pouton from MIPS said in a statement.“To address this, we developed an alternative platform designed to target SARS-CoV-2 virus mutations in the tip of the ‘spike’, otherwise known as the receptor binding domain.We found that, when administered as a third-dose booster following two doses of ancestral vaccine … our vaccine was able to effectively induce new variant-specific antibodies, making it a promising next-generation candidate to protect against new and emerging Covid-19 strains.”Prof Pouton s...

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Publisher: New York Post

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