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Vaccine Makers Ready For “Escape Variant”

Companies are updating vaccines and testing them on people to prepare for the next ‘escape variant.’

NATURE – Pfizer’s chief executive, Albert Bourla, made a bold promise in June.

Standing next to US President Joe Biden at a press conference in St Ives, UK, just before the G7 summit meeting, Bourla said that should the need arise for a new COVID-19 vaccine, his company could get one ready within 100 days.

The need he was referring to is the possible emergence of an ‘escape variant’ — a dominant strain of SARS-CoV-2 that evades the fledgling immunity established through vaccines and previous infections.

No such strain has yet been identified, but Pfizer and other leading COVID-19 vaccine makers are gearing up for that scenario.

What does it take to be nimble enough to design and test an updated vaccine against an unknown viral strain, in record time? Nature spoke to three COVID-19 vaccine makers — Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca — to find out exactly how they are preparing.

“If an escape variant emerges, RNA vaccine makers such as Pfizer and Moderna could probably design and synthesize an initial prototype jab against it in a few days.” 

Dress rehearsal

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Over the past few months, all three companies have been running dress rehearsals by practicing on known SARS-CoV-2 variants.

This involves updating their vaccines to match variants such as Beta and Delta, testing them in clinical studies, tuning their internal workflows and coordinating with regulators.

Their goal is to learn from these warm-up trials and smooth out kinks in their processes, so that they can move fast if, or when, a true escape variant emerges.

Paul Bieniasz, a virologist at the Rockefeller University in New York City, says:

“At some point, inevitably, we’re going to have to make variant vaccines — if vaccines are the way population immunity will be maintained — but we’re not at the point where we can confidently predict the evolution of the virus. 

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“Practicing with existing variants seems like a reasonable approach.”

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