Coronavirus: US vaccine protects macaques from Covid-19, studies show
- Animals injected with vaccine developed by Boston team show much lower levels of infection after being exposed to pathogen and ‘near-complete protection’ on second exposure
- Results ‘increase optimism that the development of Covid-19 vaccines [for humans] will be possible’, lead researcher says
Researchers from the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre (BIDMC) in Boston, Massachusetts carried out two studies using six DNA vaccine candidates they have been working on since January, each of which uses a different variant of a key viral protein.
The results were published on Wednesday in the peer-reviewed academic journal Science.
In the first study, the researchers injected 25 adult rhesus macaques with a vaccine, while 10 others were given a sham control – similar to a placebo – for comparison purposes.
Three weeks later, all of the animals were exposed to Sars-CoV-2 – the formal name for the novel coronavirus.
Of the vaccinated monkeys, eight showed no detectable signs of being infected, while the rest had only low levels of infection, which showed that the vaccines had induced neutralising antibody responses in the animals, the report said.
