Moving Towards a Variant-Proof Future
Dr. Jun Huang (right) and his team at UChicago work on the “nanotrap” technology to address COVID-19. Photo credit: Jun Huang
UChicago Lab tests promising new COVID vaccine adapts to changing viral variants
Dr. Jun Huang, of the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago, has always been fascinated by the immune system. After years of extensive research on how to harness the power of T-cells to treat cancer and HIV, when COVID-19 struck, it was a natural shift for Huang to see how the same approach could be used to target this new virus.
At the start of the pandemic, his team at the Huang Lab quickly developed a cutting-edge “nanotrap” to isolate and “catch” the virus inside the body—preventing the infection from spreading. “The concept is basically like creating a baseball mitt that can only catch COVID-19 virus, and keep them glued to the mitt so they can’t move,” says Huang.
That work was published and met with great enthusiasm by the larger science community. As the Delta and then Omicron variants continued to wreak global havoc and challenge the efficacy of the vaccines that made it to market, Huang and his team realized they could not stop there. They had to keep working to see if they could help create a vaccine that would be effective even in the face of an onslaught of more and more contagious variants.
As part of the Chicago CAN initiative, Walder Foundation provided support for continued research. “Imagine if people could keep changing their physical appearance to the point that you could no longer recognize them,” Huang explained of the ongoing COVID variants. “Our challenge was to come up with a vaccine that can protect even against the most dramatically different variants.”
Compared to current vaccines on the market (from Moderna, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson), which are essentially each a cocktail of antibodies that can only work on a specific version of the virus, the vaccine Huang and his team have created is a living drug. Using their new nanotechnology insights, they’ve harnessed the power of targeted delivery to T-cells to strengthen the immune response, even if the virus has changed forms due to different variants.
Not only is this new vaccine potentially more effective against changing variants, but because of the way it is created, it can also theoretically be produced much less expensively and more quickly than existing vaccines.
“Historically, developing a vaccine has taken 8-10 years,” said Huang, who is quick to explain that this timeline was accelerated with the vaccines currently on the market because they were based on adapting technologies that had already been studied for years—not totally new hypotheses.
If Huang’s new plan works, however, he believes future vaccines could be developed in less than a year. His current vaccine will first have to pass a rigorous set of tests and clinical trials on a much larger scale than his small lab has been able to conduct. Though the recent studies on lab mice only tested for efficacy—monitoring for such things as inflammation, antibody titers, and ultimately, survival with no side effects, Huang says all of the ingredients used in the vaccine have already been approved by the FDA. However, those approvals were made on the individual components, not this particular “recipe.”
If all continues to move forward as planned, Huang says his team will plan to submit their findings for publication by the summer of 2022. After that, it will be up to the market to fund human trials and potentially move into actual production and distribution.
For Huang, the hope is his work will play a small role in advancing our ability to move forward from this pandemic. “My goal is just to help patients. If we can help one patient, we’ve helped a whole family—and in a way, an entire world,” said Huang.
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