SCIENTISTS at Imperial College London have announced they will not be proceeding with large-scale testing of their Covid-19 vaccine because of the rapid approval of other jabs within the UK.
Professor Robin Shattock said his team would instead be using the RNA technology behind the vaccine to target new and emerging coronavirus variants that have been identified around the world.
“Although our first-generation Covid-19 vaccine candidate is showing promise in early clinical development, the broader situation has changed with the rapid rollout of approved vaccines,” Prof Shattock said in a statement on Tuesday.
“It is not the right time to start a new efficacy trial for a further vaccine in the UK, with the emphasis rightly placed on mass vaccination in response to the rapid spread of the new variant.”
He said his team would begin working to develop the vaccine technology as “a safety net to catch escape mutations, reach variants that other vaccines may not, and meet potential needs for annual booster vaccinations”.
Similar in design to the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines, the Imperial College jab makes use of self-amplifying RNA to deliver genetic instructions to human muscle cells, which then go on to produce the spike protein found on the surface of Sars-CoV-2.
Imperial’s self-amplifying RNA technology can be adapted to target new variants and mutations of Sars-CoV-2. This capability could be central in developing second-generation vaccines against Covid-19 as the pandemic progresses.
The team at Imperial College has also developed approaches that could enable RNA vaccines to be stored in ordinary refrigerators for months, rather than the extremely low temperatures required by the current RNA vaccines.