Effective vaccines dramatically changed the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, preventing illness, reducing disease severity, and saving millions of lives.
- By CATHERINE CARUSO
However, five years later, SARS-CoV-2 is still circulating, and in the process, evolving into new variants that require updated vaccines to protect against them.
But it takes time to design, manufacture, and distribute a new vaccine, which raises an important question: How can scientists create vaccines for versions of the virus that haven't happened yet?
One solution comes from a predictive AI model called EVE-Vax built by a team of scientists at Harvard Medical School, the HMS-led Massachusetts Consortium on Pathogen Readiness (MassCPR), and other institutions.
The new model, described May 8 in Immunity, uses evolutionary, biological, and structural information about a virus to predict and design surface proteins likely to occur as the pathogen mutates. The researchers successfully applied EVE-Vax to SARS-CoV-2, designing viral proteins that elicited similar immune responses as the actual proteins that evolved during the COVID-19 pandemic.
