Viruses like SARS-CoV-2 use sugar molecules to hide from the immune system, but scientists at Scripps Research have designed a universal coronavirus vaccine that strips these sugars and exposes a stable, rarely mutating part of the spike protein. This approach triggered strong immune responses in
I’m not a biologist, so forgive me for being a complete layperson about this - but to check my understanding, this means that the material in the vaccine itself (‘immunogen’) has had the sugar stripped, correct? In other words, if we think of the sugar as “armour” on the virus, the vaccine isn’t injecting some sort of armor removing enzyme, it’s sending “armourless training dummies” into your body that THEY used an enzyme on, so your immune cells can prepare to hit their “vital organs”?
Reading the abstract itself it was a bit hard to parse, but we do try!