What we've made is a nanoparticle based vaccine.
Nanoparticle vaccines, we found, have improved immune responses.
And one reason we think it does is because it actually looks like a virus.
I remember Fiala and I work at the Institute for Protein Design.
I'm a research scientist here
at University of Washington in the School of Medicine.
So we took a very small piece of a protein
from coronavirus, and we've decorated our nanoparticles with that.
When we gave this nanoparticle vaccine to mice,
we saw a dramatic increase in antibody production,
the ability of the mouse blood to neutralize the virus
was substantially greater with the nanoparticle
based vaccines
I've been working on coronaviruses
for the past five years, and until earlier this year,
no one else really seemed to know or care much about them.
But obviously that's all changed.
I am Lexy Walz, and I am a scientist in David Villa's laboratory
in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Washington.
We used kind of the base of knowledge that we've been gaining over the last
five years in the visitor lab to
pick, which constructs we could use and pick
what type of vaccine we wanted to test and how we wanted to test that.
A lot of the other vaccine trials are using the entire spike protein.
We decided just to use one specific piece of the spike protein
to really focus the immune response.
So we wanted to train our immune system on just this piece to have the strongest
response possible and not only that, but we also displayed it
on a next generation nanoparticle to boost your immune response even more.
We've actually used this highly engineered system
before for other coronaviruses prior to 20, 20.
And so that really got us the information and the knowledge necessary
to move and move with this as fast as possible.
One of the main things that we wanted to see was how
putting these pieces on the nanoparticle would enhance
either the immune response or our ability to really scale back
the vaccine for it's called dose sparing so that we can give smaller amounts
to more people and therefore get more people vaccinated quickly.
And so
we really wanted to compare head to head, just the RBD alone.
So just that portion of the spike protein the spike protein alone
and the RBD on the nanoparticle.
And not only did we want to compare those, we also wanted to compare them
to samples from patients who had actually been infected with COVID.
And to see, you know, was our vaccine actually producing
a better response than people with a natural infection?
A lot of this work has been characterizing first in the test tube
and then in mice, and we've seen amazing results in mice.
And so we've even moved into nonhuman primates and we're still seeing
just incredible results.
So we're really excited to see where this goes.
Putting the RBD onto a nanoparticle.
Both gave a stronger response than was seen with patients
who were naturally infected and allowed us to really spare dosage
compared to just the individual contracts alone.
Not multimode raised on this large nanoparticle.
So really, everything worked as we kind of dreamed.
In another experiment, we actually tested whether our vaccinated
mice could survive a COVID 19 like infection.
And what we saw with our nanoparticle was that it was fully protective
in all of the mice, which was really, really exciting.
I have never, ever worked at this Fast-Paced,
and I think everyone on the team can equally say that, you know,
we're having Zoom meetings twice a week.
We were up late, up early, you know, just constantly pushing
because for one of the first times
our work has direct outcomes that could really help others.
And so that's motivating, but also humbling.
This will not be the last pandemic.
I can tell you that with certainty, whether it will be a coronavirus,
whether it will be another family of viruses that we know
have pandemic potential, I can't predict that.
But what I can say is that this will unfortunately not be the last.
And so pushes like these to make vaccine platforms
like our nanoparticle will only serve to benefit us in the future.