By studying the neutralising antibodies of SARS survivors who had been vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2, a cross-disciplinary research team led by Professor Wang Linfa from Duke-NUS’ Emerging Infectious Diseases Programme identified powerful antibodies that could neutralise not just SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 but also similar viruses in the same sub-genus of coronaviruses.
Published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the researchers — Drs Tan Chee Wah and Chia Wan Ni among them — reported that while most
survivors of the 2003 SARS-CoV-1 outbreak retained neutralising antibodies, these antibodies were not able to neutralise SARS-CoV-2. It was only after being vaccinated with an mRNA vaccine that they produced these broadly neutralising antibodies.
Using an advanced version of the surrogate virus neutralisation test, which in its original format had been commercialised as cPass™, the team confirmed that these neutralising antibodies could knock out up to 10 different coronaviruses that belong to a sub-genus of beta-coronaviruses called sarbecoviruses.
These include SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 as well as several pre-emergent viruses identified in bats and pangolins.
Speaking at a news conference announcing the discovery, Wang said that this could become an alternative to variant-specific booster strategies, called 2GCoVax.
“We think this provides the scientific foundation to try a new boosting strategy—we call that 3GCoVax—to combat different variants including the current four and future ones,” said Wang during a press briefing, adding that the
same principle could be used to produce therapeutic antibodies.
He went on to note that the World Health Organisation was targeting to have the majority of the global population vaccinated with existing vaccines in a year’s time.
“If we boost that population with the 3GCoVax,” he said, “we also potentially can be ready to fight and prevent the next pandemic of SARS-3 or SARS-4.”