Northwestern Medicine scientists have shown for the first time that coronavirus vaccines and prior coronavirus infections can provide broad immunity against other, similar coronaviruses. The findings build a rationale for universal coronavirus vaccines that could prove useful in the face of future epidemics.

Two of the commonly used coronavirus vaccines provide protection against multiple variants of the virus that causes COVID-19, including the highly infectious Delta variant, a new Yale study has found.

The findings, published Oct. 11 in the journal Nature, also show at those infected with the virus prior to vaccination exhibit a more robust immune response to all variants than those who were uninfected and fully vaccinated.

The newly identified antibody was isolated using lymphocytes from COVID-19 patients enrolled in the ImmunoCoV study being carried out by CHUV’s Service of Immunology and Allergy. This antibody is one of the most powerful identified so far against SARS-CoV-2. Structural characterization of the antibody indicates that it binds to an area that is not subjected to mutations of the spike protein.

COVID-19 vaccines are highly effective in preventing symptomatic illness among health care workers in real-world settings.

The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that health care personnel who received a two-dose regimen of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine had an 89% lower risk for symptomatic illness than those who were unvaccinated.

Polymorphs are molecules that have different molecular packing arrangements despite identical chemical compositions. In a recent paper, researchers at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC) combined their proprietary (GSK) and published (CCDC) datasets to better train machine learning (ML) models to predict stable polymorphs to use in new drug candidates.

More countries with greater resources are opening up for a more normal life. But COVID-19 and the SARS-CoV-2 virus are still a significant threat in large parts of the world.

The lack of medicines that are effective, easy to distribute and easy to obtain are a significant part of the problem.

A recent Cleveland Clinic study found that patients who regularly use steroid nasal sprays are less likely to develop severe COVID-19-related disease, including a 20 to 25% lower risk of hospitalization, ICU admission and mortality. The study was published in Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology: In Practice.