Boosting Vaccine Programs Ahead of the Next Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic put the pressure on vaccine developers as a desperate global population checked Twitter daily for news of progress. Science delivered, and much faster than anyone expected, underscoring the vital role of advanced workflows and analytical instruments that expedite vaccine research.
This article is posted on our Science Snippets Blog
All Eyes are on Vaccines
The vaccine market is growing at a rapid pace due to booming populations and the increasing burden of infectious diseases. A 2021 Research and Markets report valued the global vaccine market at $187 billion, with COVID-19 making up the largest share.
What was most surprising about the COVID-19 vaccines was the speed of development. The average vaccine takes years to develop, but the first COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials began within months of sequencing the novel SARS-CoV-2. This rapid response was made possible by our robust vaccine platforms and highlights the critical role of high-throughput technologies for characterizing therapeutic targets and vaccine candidates.
Meeting Rising Demands
Affinity characterization, neutralization and competition studies of lead candidates are key steps of the overall vaccine research and development process. When evaluating a new vaccine, it is common practice to test vaccine-induced antibodies for binding to specific viral proteins, or to apply epitope binning strategies against a panel of protein targets. Our ability to act on new pathogens such as SARS-CoV-2 requires flexible methodologies that simplify workflows and reduce time-to-decision.
Limitations around throughput are one of the important challenges in early discovery. Traditional endpoint or equilibrium binding assays involve long protocols, expensive labeling-schemes and may not be amenable to high-throughput screening.
Aside from throughput, vaccine developers may also have unique needs when using assays involving crude extracts or native, non-labeled proteins. Companies are increasingly finding these capabilities in real-time label-free solutions for molecular interaction analysis.
Why Label-Free Analysis
Bio-Layer Interferometry (BLI) is a biosensor technology for real-time monitoring of molecular binding interaction dynamics, like kinetic rate constants and affinity binding constants, without the labeling requirement. The Octet®️ BLI high-throughput systems have greatly contributed to research and development of vaccines in recent years, in particular the COVID-19 vaccines.
Companies are using the Octet®️ BLI platform in upstream and downstream of vaccine development and manufacturing to study vaccine potency, stability and antibody titer. Its label-independence greatly streamlines sample preparation and helps to speed up workflows.
BLI technology also has unique benefits for antibody epitope characterization and coverage determination. Usually, classical sandwich and in-tandem epitope binning formats use crude monoclonal antibody supernatants, which can clog microfluidics-based system designs. Since the Octet® BLI instruments are fluidic-free, they can be used for all binning formats.
Research Highlights
High-throughput, label-free kinetic interaction analysis has been widely used in a range of vaccine programs, including HIV, influenza, Ebola, and the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 to select and characterize antigenic targets, vaccines and therapeutic candidates.
In a 2021 study published in the Journal of Immunology, Caniels et al. evaluated the binding kinetics and neutralization potency of sera collected from patients who recovered from COVID-19, or COVID-19 mRNA vaccine recipients. They used Octet®️ BLI technology to show significantly diminished antibody binding to the spike proteins of beta and gamma variants.
A different study published in the same year identified antibodies from COVID-19 convalescent patients with cross reactivity against other betacoronaviruses. Here, Pinto et al. used BLI experiments to measure the binding of antibodies to a conserved region on the coronavirus spike glycoprotein.
In our new ebook created with Science/AAAS, we discuss the applications of label-free binding analysis in vaccine development and provide full research manuscripts of published studies, included those mentioned above.
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