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Jan 12, 2024

Going beyond B cells in the search for a more multi-targeted vaccine

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, chemistry

Part 3: This is the last of a three-part series on how Stanford Medicine researchers are designing vaccines that protect people from not merely individual viral strains but broad ranges of them. The ultimate goal: a vaccine with coverage so broad it can protect against viruses never before encountered.

Until now, vaccine efforts have mainly focused on stimulating B cells, described and discussed in Part 1 and Part 2. These antibody-producing immune cells’ virtue of being highly specific in what they target is also a vice. An antibody against influenza is unlikely to ever bind to, say, a coronavirus or a rabies virus.

Even when a virus mutates in some small way that distorts or disguises one of its biochemical bull’s-eyes, antibodies that worked before (because they aimed at that particular bull’s-eye) are now unemployed.

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