The 30 or so subjects that made it through the bottleneck of Covid surging in China to receive the second dose could absolutely be “unique” in risk avoidance behaviors or immunity.
I am optimistic that even with hybrid immunity in the nasal mucosa of most people, giving a short term boost there will hopefully reduce infections (zero of those 30 is still impressive in the context of a surge that caught 85% of the Chinese population).
Also, hopefully priming the defenses at the front door will lead to lower viral loads and faster clearance of coronaviruses, both associated with less collateral damage and long covid.
I’m still optimistic these will be net positives if not game changers, and such platforms will need to be nimble to keep up with mutations in spike. Hope someone is targeting other conserved antigens/pancoronavirus epitopes?
I think that if we want really substantial gains, simply delivering a spike protein from an extant variant (however immunogenic the delivery method) will not suffice. It needs to be more innovative than that. If people are more willing to take a nasal vaccine than a shot though, that could translate to more substantial gains even if they don’t work meaningfully better than current approaches. But there are still a lot of practical challenges with nasal vaccines- maybe I’ll save that for another post.
Excellent run down thank you.
The 30 or so subjects that made it through the bottleneck of Covid surging in China to receive the second dose could absolutely be “unique” in risk avoidance behaviors or immunity.
I am optimistic that even with hybrid immunity in the nasal mucosa of most people, giving a short term boost there will hopefully reduce infections (zero of those 30 is still impressive in the context of a surge that caught 85% of the Chinese population).
Also, hopefully priming the defenses at the front door will lead to lower viral loads and faster clearance of coronaviruses, both associated with less collateral damage and long covid.
I’m still optimistic these will be net positives if not game changers, and such platforms will need to be nimble to keep up with mutations in spike. Hope someone is targeting other conserved antigens/pancoronavirus epitopes?
I think that if we want really substantial gains, simply delivering a spike protein from an extant variant (however immunogenic the delivery method) will not suffice. It needs to be more innovative than that. If people are more willing to take a nasal vaccine than a shot though, that could translate to more substantial gains even if they don’t work meaningfully better than current approaches. But there are still a lot of practical challenges with nasal vaccines- maybe I’ll save that for another post.
Ps - the grandeur, science, and terror of the immune system are incredible, thanks for the reminder.