Valneva, a French company, is producing a COVID-19 vaccine that it hopes will offer much better protection against most variants of the coronavirus.
If it does, it would greatly reduce, if not eliminate, the need for booster shots.
The Valneva vaccine, known as VLA2001, uses “whole virus” technology. Whole virus technology involves taking an entire virus and deactivating it so that it cannot infect a human. But when injected, it will induce an immune response.
“Having that broader antigenic real estate from a whole virus vaccine really matters,” Kate Bingham, former head of the United Kingdom’s Vaccine Taskforce, told Bloomberg News. “Viruses mutate. So by having a broader immune response, which you get with a whole vaccine, you can potentially provide that ongoing protection.”
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Most other COVID-19 vaccines use mRNA or viral vector technology that focuses the immune response on the coronavirus spike protein, the part of the virus that attaches to human cells. However, spike proteins mutate, and a coronavirus with such a mutation could evade the antibodies created by the vaccine. Companies such as Pfizer are now working on booster vaccines that will target the mutations.
Because a whole virus vaccine uses an entire virus, it will induce an immune response that will target many different types of proteins on the virus. This broader general immune response may mean that the vaccine will induce an immune response to parts of the virus that do not mutate. That could obviate the need for booster shots.
The Valneva vaccine has just entered phase 3 trials in the U.K. and wouldn’t be approved for general use until later this year. However, the road ahead for the Valneva vaccine is riskier than for earlier coronavirus vaccines. The U.K. is requiring Valneva to perform better than the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine, which has an efficacy of 82%.
“There is no development without risk,” Valneva CEO Thomas Lingelbach told Bloomberg News. When asked what would happen if VLA2001 had lower efficacy, Lingelbach said, “To be honest with you, I don’t even like to think about that scenario.”
The U.K. government has preordered 100 million doses from Valneva.
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There are whole virus COVID-19 vaccines that are currently available from the Chinese companies Sinovac and Sinopharm. But the companies have been panned for not being open with the data on the effectiveness of their vaccines. Sinovac, for example, was heavily criticized when different trials of its vaccines generated different efficacy rates, ranging from 50% to over 83%.
In the United States, top government infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci has said that researchers are pursuing a “pan-coronavirus vaccine” that could protect against multiple strains of the virus.
