City of Hope COVID-19 investigational vaccine produces strong immunity in preclinical research
On November 30, 2020, City of Hope announced that an investigational vaccine produced strong protective immunity against SARS-CoV-2, including neutralizing antibodies that recognize the current dominant circulating form, which is a mutant of the original Wuhan strain, according to research published in Nature Communications. The vaccine is now being tested in a phase 1 clinical trial at City of Hope, an independent biomedical research and treatment center for cancer, diabetes and other life-threatening diseases.
The investigational vaccine generated abundant neutralizing antibodies, which prevented the virus from infecting healthy cells, and produced strong responses by T cells against the virus’ spike (S) and nucleocapsid (N) antigens. The strong T cell response could provide long-term protection that may protect recipients of the vaccine against future SARS-Cov-2 outbreaks.
“Our investigational vaccine aims to address one of the challenges in combatting coronavirus infections — immunity against these viruses can be short-lived, less than six months in some COVID-19 patients,” said Don J. Diamond, Ph.D., a professor with City of Hope’s Department of Hematology & Hematopoietic Cell Transplantation who specializes in vaccine research. “City of Hope wanted to improve on the vaccine’s capability of stimulating protective immunity. We did that by activating T cells, which constitute the other powerful arm of the immune system.”
City of Hope is a Founding Sponsor of BioscienceLA. You can read the full article here.
Update: On December 11, 2020, City of Hope administered their first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. Read more here.
