December 1, 2021
A new kind of COVID-19 vaccine is about to roll out around the world. Although it won’t replace the highly successful vaccines currently available, it could make a difference in the course of the pandemic, especially in lower resourced countries.
These new vaccines are what’s called protein subunit vaccines. They work by injecting people with a tiny portion of the virus. In the case of the COVID-19 vaccine, that tiny portion is the so-called spike protein critical for the virus to enter cells.
An advantage of protein subunit vaccines is they tend to be very stable, so they don’t require freezers for storage. A regular refrigerator is adequate. This makes distributing the vaccine much easier.
“We were assuming that the protein subunit vaccines would play a big role in accelerating development of a COVID vaccine,” says Julie McElrath directs the vaccine and infectious disease division at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. McElrath said she and her colleagues’ confidence came because there were already subunit vaccines on the market for infectious diseases.
Read more at NPR.