The development of a safe and effective vaccine will likely be required to end the COVID-19 pandemic. A group of scientists, led by Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) immunologist Dan H. Barouch, MD, PhD, now report that a leading candidate COVID-19 vaccine developed at BIDMC in collaboration with Johnson & Johnson raised neutralizing antibodies and robustly protected non-human primates (NHPs) against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

A protein produced by the human immune system can strongly inhibit corona viruses, including Sars-Cov-2, the pathogen causing Covid-19. An international team from Germany, Switzerland and the USA successfully showed that the LY6E-Protein prevents coronaviruses from causing an infection.

Two doses of an experimental vaccine to prevent coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) induced robust immune responses and rapidly controlled the coronavirus in the upper and lower airways of rhesus macaques exposed to SARS-CoV-2, report scientists from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health. SARS-CoV-2 is the virus that causes COVID-19.

An experimental messenger RNA (mRNA)-based vaccine against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) elicits protective immune responses in mice and non-human primates, researchers report on July 23rd in the journal Cell. Two injections of the vaccine were sufficient to induce robust immunity, completely preventing SARS-CoV-2 infection in mice.

Researchers at Columbia University Irving Medical Center have isolated antibodies from several COVID-19 patients that, to date, are among the most potent in neutralizing the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

These antibodies could be produced in large quantities by pharmaceutical companies to treat patients, especially early in the course of infection, and to prevent infection, particularly in the elderly.

The study by scientists from Duke-NUS Medical School, in close collaboration with the National University of Singapore (NUS) Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, Singapore General Hospital (SGH) and National Centre for Infectious Diseases (NCID) was published in Nature.

A common drug, already approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), may also be a powerful tool in fighting COVID-19, according to research published this week in Antiviral Research.

SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, uses a surface spike protein to latch onto human cells and initiate infection.