It was an honor welcoming the 49th Vice President of the United States Kamala Harris to NIH on January 26, 2021. She received her second dose of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine at the NIH Clinical Center in a livestreamed event. All was a thumbs up afterwards. The NIH community thanks Vice President Harris for her kind words and looks forward to her future visits to the NIH campus. Credit: NIH

Recently, there is a new and very hopeful COVID-19 number for everyone to track: the total number of vaccine doses that have been administered in the United States. If 80 percent of Americans roll up their sleeves in the coming months and accept COVID-19 vaccinations, we can greatly slow the spread of the novel coronavirus in our communities and bring this horrible pandemic to an end in 2021.

So far, more than 20 million people in our country have received one or two doses of either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine. While this number is lower than initially projected for a variety of logistical reasons, we’re already seeing improvements in the distribution system that has made it possible to get close to 1 million doses administered per day.

If you want to keep track of the vaccine progress in your state over the coming weeks, it’s now pretty easy to do online. A fine resource is the vaccine information on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) COVID Data Tracker. It offers an interactive state-by-state map, as well as data on vaccinations in long-term care facilities. Keep in mind that there’s a delay of three to five days in reporting actual vaccinations from the states.

There’s also a lot of useful information on the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center’s Vaccine Tracker. Posting the daily updates is a team, led by William Moss, that draws on the expertise of data scientists, analysts, programmers, and researchers. The Hopkins team gathers its vaccination data from each state’s official dashboard, webpages, press releases, or wherever cumulative numbers are reported. Not all states publish the same vaccine information, and that’s what can make the Vaccine Tracker so challenging to compile.

The Hopkins team now presents on its homepage the top 10 U. S. states and territories to vaccinate fully the highest percentage of their residents. With another click, there’s also a full rundown of vaccine administration by state and territory, plus the District of Columbia. The site also links to lots of other information about COVID-19—including cases, testing, contact tracing, and an interactive tool about vaccine development.

In uncertain times, knowledge can be a source of comfort. That’s what makes these interactive COVID-19 resources so helpful and empowering. They show that, with time, safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines will indeed coming to everyone. I hope that you will accept your vaccine, like I did when given the opportunity. However, until we get to the point where most Americans are immunized, we must stay vigilant and keep up our tried-and-true public health measures such as wearing masks, limiting physical interactions (especially indoors), and washing our hands.

Links:

COVID-19 Research (NIH)

CDC COVID Data Tracker (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta)

Coronavirus Resource Center (Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine)

William Moss (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore)

International Vaccine Access Center (Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore)

A new coronavirus vaccine approach works by attaching many spike protein receptor-binding domains (RBDs) to an engineered protein-based nanoparticle. In mice, the vaccine induced a cross-reactive antibody response capable of neutralizing many different coronavirus strains. Credit: Adapted from image by A. Cohen via BioRender

It’s truly encouraging to witness people all across our nation rolling up their sleeves to get their COVID-19 vaccines. That is our best chance to end this pandemic. But this is the third coronavirus to emerge and cause serious human illness in the last 20 years, and it’s probably not the last. So, this is also an opportunity to step up our efforts to develop vaccines to combat future strains of disease-causing coronavirus. With this in mind, I’m heartened by a new NIH-funded study showing the potential of a remarkably adaptable, nanoparticle-based approach to coronavirus vaccine development [1].

Both COVID-19 vaccines currently authorized for human use by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) work by using mRNA to instruct our cells to make an essential portion of the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2, which is the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. As our immune system learns to recognize this protein fragment as foreign, it produces antibodies to attack SARS-CoV-2 and prevent COVID-19. What makes the new vaccine technology so powerful is that it raises the possibility of training the immune system to recognize not just one strain of coronavirus—but up to eight—with a single shot.

This approach has not yet been tested in people, but when a research team, led by Pamela Bjorkman, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, injected this new type of vaccine into mice, it spurred the production of antibodies that react to a variety of different coronaviruses. In fact, some of the mouse antibodies proved to be reactive to related strains of coronavirus that weren’t even represented in the vaccine. These findings suggest that if presented with multiple different fragments of the spike protein’s receptor binding domain (RBD), which is what SARS-like coronaviruses use to infect human cells, the immune system may learn to recognize common features that might protect against as-yet unknown, newly emerging coronaviruses.

This new work, published in the journal Science, utilizes a technology called a mosaic nanoparticle vaccine platform [1]. Originally developed by collaborators at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom, the nanoparticle component of the platform is a “cage” made up of 60 identical proteins. Each of those proteins has a small protein tag that functions much like a piece of Velcro®. In their SARS-CoV-2 work, Bjorkman and her colleagues, including graduate student Alex A. Cohen, engineered multiple different fragments of the spike protein so each had its own Velcro-like tag. When mixed with the nanoparticle, the spike protein fragments stuck to the cage, resulting in a vaccine nanoparticle with spikes representing four to eight distinct coronavirus strains on its surface. In this instance, the researchers chose spike protein fragments from several different strains of SARS-CoV-2, as well as from other related bat coronaviruses thought to pose a threat to humans.

The researchers then injected the vaccine nanoparticles into mice and the results were encouraging. After inoculation, the mice began producing antibodies that could neutralize many different strains of coronavirus. In fact, while more study is needed to understand the mechanisms, the antibodies responded to coronavirus strains that weren’t even represented on the mosaic nanoparticle. Importantly, this broad antibody response came without apparent loss in the antibodies’ ability to respond to any one particular coronavirus strain.

The findings raise the exciting possibility that this new vaccine technology could provide protection against many coronavirus strains with a single shot. Of course, far more study is needed to explore how well such vaccines work to protect animals against infection, and whether they will prove to be safe and effective in people. There will also be significant challenges in scaling up manufacturing. Our goal is not to replace the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines that scientists developed at such a remarkable pace over the last year, but to provide much-needed vaccine strategies and tools to respond swiftly to the emerging coronavirus strains of the future.

As we double down on efforts to combat COVID-19, we must also come to grips with the fact that SARS-CoV-2 isn’t the first—and surely won’t be the last—novel coronavirus to cause disease in humans. With continued research and development of new technologies such as this one, the hope is that we will come out of this terrible pandemic better prepared for future infectious disease threats.

References:

[1] Mosaic RBD nanoparticles elicit neutralizing antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 and zoonotic coronaviruses. Cohen AA, Gnanapragasam PNP, Lee YE, Hoffman PR, Ou S, Kakutani LM, Keeffe JR, Barnes CO, Nussenzweig MC, Bjorkman PJ. Science. 2021 Jan 12.

Links:

COVID-19 Research (NIH)

Bjorkman Lab (California Institute of Technology, Pasadena)

NIH Support: National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases