The new research has found that Pfizer and Moderna Covid vaccines should be highly effective against two coronavirus variants first identified in India, said the US scientists.
NYU Grossman School of Medicine and NYU Langone Center, conducted the lab-base study, which is considered preliminary since it has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal.
According to the senior author Nathaneil Ned Landau, the vaccine’s antibodies are a little bit weaker against the new variants, but not enough that it will affect the protective ability of the vaccines, he said.
The study was performed on people who were vaccinated with either of the two shots of Pfizer and Moderna. The researchers took blood samples from these people and exposed them in a lab to engineered pseudovirus particles that contained mutations in the spike region of the coronavirus, which were particular to either the B.1.617 or B.1.618 found in India.
The mixture was then exposed to lab-grown cells, to find out how many could become infected. In order to know how many cells are infected, the engineered pseudovirus particles contained an enzyme called luciferase which helps to know based on light measurements.
The results showed that for B.1.617, there is almost four-fold reduction in the amount of neutralising antibodies-Y shaped proteins the immune system creates to stop pathogens from invading cells. For B.1.618, the reduction was found to be three-fold.
Some of the antibodies don’t work anymore against the variants, but you still have a lot of antibodies that do work against the variants. There is enough work that we believe that the vaccines will be highly protective, said Landau, adding that this kind of lab investigation cannot predict what the real world efficacy might look like.
Landau’s team showed the India-dominant Covid variants were able to bind more tightly to the receptor called ACE2, like other variants of concern. This might be linked to its increased transmissibility compared to the original strain. The recent lab-based results lend confidence that current vaccines will provide protection against variants identified to date, the team concluded.
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However, the they do not preclude the possibility that newer variants that are more resistant to vaccines will emerge. In addition, they highlighted the importance of widespread vaccination at the global level.