A vaccine against all coronaviruses was created by AI at once — and it worked on people

British scientists tested a vaccine on volunteers that was almost entirely designed by artificial intelligence. The drug does not target one specific virus — it targets the whole family of coronaviruses at once, including those that are still in bats and have not yet reached people.

Cambridge University and its commercial spin-off DIOSynVax brought the matter to a logical point: after animal experiments, the vaccine was injected for the first time (more precisely, injected without a needle) into living people. The trial involved 39 healthy volunteers aged 18 to 50 years, the sites were NIHR clinical sites in Southampton and Cambridge, writes xrust. The result is no serious side effects, the vaccine is considered safe and well tolerated. The work was published in Journal of Infection .

What's so unusual about this

A conventional vaccine is a sniper shot at a specific strain. The virus mutates — it has to be reloaded and fired again, as happens every year with flu shots or as it happened with endless updates of COVID-19 vaccines. Scientists themselves compare this race to a dog trying to catch its tail: it’s possible to catch up, but there’s little point in it.

Here the approach is different. The AI ​​system was set against not just one virus, but the entire array of genetic data of pathogens from the Sarbecovirus group — this is a family that includes SARS-CoV-2 (the culprit of the 2020 pandemic), the original SARS and a whole set of related bat coronaviruses that have not yet entered the human body. The algorithm found areas common to all these viruses at once, and assembled from them a single “super-antigen” — in fact, a universal target for the immune system.

As a result, the vaccine, after administration, triggered an immune response not only against SARS-CoV-2 and SARS, but also against those very “dormant” bat viruses that the human body had never encountered before. An indicative moment: this is the first time in history when the active ingredient of a vaccine, completely designed on a computer, reached human trials.

Without a needle — and this is not only for those who are afraid of injections

A separate detail that will probably catch on: in this trial, the vaccine was administered not with a syringe, but through a micro-jet injector — essentially, a thin jet under pressure pierces the skin without a needle. In addition to the obvious advantage for people with needle phobia, the developers are betting on logistics: during mass vaccination campaigns, especially in regions with limited infrastructure, doing without needles and syringes can simply be faster and cheaper.

What's next

Professor Jonathan Heaney, who led the scientific part of the project at Cambridge, says that in this way vaccines turn from “reactive” (first the virus, then the response) to “proactive”: protection should remain even as the virus manages to mutate into new variants. His colleague, Professor Saul Faust from the University of Southampton, who oversaw the trial, adds: if such vaccines can be brought to clinical use before a new outbreak begins, this could, in theory, save millions of lives and save the economy from further lockdowns.

So far, this is only the first, most careful phase of testing — it answers the question “is it safe,” and not “does it really work?” Next, researchers are waiting for the second phase — with a much wider and more diverse group of volunteers, where they will look at whether the immune response is really strong and universal, and not just “not harmful”.

What is important is that Cambridge does not plan to dwell on coronaviruses. According to the developers, the same strategy — feeding AI data from an entire family of viruses and receiving one universal antigen — is expected to be tested on both influenza viruses and the Ebola group. Given that these two families are regularly cited as the leading candidates for the “X virus” of the next pandemic, interest in the technology is only likely to grow.

The project was financed by the British Innovate UK, and in the DIOSynVax portfolio, in addition to coronaviruses, there are already vaccine candidates against seasonal and pandemic influenza and hemorrhagic fevers — that is, the chosen direction is clearly not a one-time experiment, but part of the company’s broader strategy.

Sources:

• sciencedaily.com
• cam.ac.uk
• sciencedirect.com

Xrust AI created a vaccine against all coronaviruses at once — and it worked on people