We are now in the “digital era” of vaccine development, University of Washington researcher Neil King said at the GeekWire Summit in Seattle on Tuesday.
King talked about how to prevent the next pandemic and also discussed the development of experimental vaccines for COVID-19, flu and other viruses based on research from the UW’s Institute for Protein Design, where he is an assistant professor.
“Ultimately I think computational protein design, in combination with technologies both old and new, is going to allow us to make vaccines that are safer and more effective against targets that have historically been really difficult,” said King, who co-founded the vaccine company Icosavax, which went public this summer. Icosavax is moving forward with clinical trials for a COVID-19 shot based on IPD research, and a shot against respiratory syncytial virus, a cause of pneumonia.
King’s lab deploys computational methods to predict how proteins behave and fold into specific shapes.
“That gives us the ability to make up scaffolds of different sizes and shapes and symmetries and test which one works best,” he said. After landing on a design, the researchers engineer protein scaffolds with viral proteins stuck to them. That is the basis of their experimental vaccines.
“We find when we attach viral and bacterial proteins to these scaffolds, just as we hypothesize, they instruct the immune system to make higher levels of protective antibodies, and that makes a more potent vaccine,” said King.
The new COVID-19 vaccine candidates are studded with 60 copies of the spike protein on a spherical scaffold. The experimental vaccines are shelf-stable, key for nimble global distribution. In addition to phase 1 and 2 trials underway with Icosavax, phase 3 trials of a similar COVID-19 shot are underway with drug giant GlaxoSmithKline and Korean company SK Bioscience.
