Towards first Saudi Arabian candidate for Beta-CoVs (MERS/COVID) Universal Vaccine (SABUvax)

We explored our hypothesis, through a KSHI seed grant, that there exists some cross protective immunity for COVID-19 in MERS survivors considering several conserved epitopic regions we identified in Spike and E protein from MERS and SARS-CoV-2 variants. Using sera from MERS survivors sampled in 2018, 2021 and 2022, we tested neutralisation of 26 different Beta-CoVs through Pseudovirus Neutralisation Assays (PvNA). Results show that cross-reactive antibodies from these human serum samples offer varying but significant levels of neutralisation against Beta-CoVs considered including human- and bat-infecting variants of SARS-1, SARS-2, MERS infecting humans and camels, as well as MERS relative NeoCoV bat coronavirus. Our results against Beta-CoVs, including notably NeoCoV, can now be of guiding towards the design and development of a Universal Beta-CoVs Vaccine considering the knowledge of antigenic regions from Spike and other structural proteins we recover from available cross-neutralizing antibodies in the human serum samples we tested.

Speakers

Dr. Intikhab Alam

Senior Scientist in Bioinformatics