One in every of the 12 labors of Hercules, in keeping with ancient lore, was to destroy a nine-headed monster called the Hydra. The challenge was that when Hercules used his sword to cut off one in all the monster’s heads, two would grow back as a replacement. He due to this fact needed a further weapon, a torch, to conquer his foe.
There are parallels between this legend and our three-years-and-counting battle with SARS-Cov-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. Each time scientists have thought they’d subdued one strain of the virus — be it alpha, beta, delta, or omicron — one other variant or subvariant emerged a short time later.
Because of this, researchers at MIT and other institutions are preparing a brand new strategy against the virus — a novel vaccine that, unlike those in use today, could potentially counteract all variants of the disease, having a property called “pan-variance” that might circumvent the necessity for a unique booster shot each time a latest strain comes into circulation. In a paper published today within the journal , the teamreports on experiments with mice that reveal the vaccine’s effectiveness in stopping death from Covid-19 infection.
Viral vaccines typically work by exposing the immune system to a small piece of the virus. That may create learned responses that protect people later once they’re exposed to the actual virus. The premise of ordinary Covid-19 vaccines, reminiscent of those produced by Moderna and Pfizer, is to activate the a part of the immune system that releases neutralizing antibodies. They do that by providing cells with instructions (in the shape of mRNA molecules) for making the spike protein — a protein found on the surface of the Covid-19 virus whose presence can trigger an immune response. “The issue with that approach is that the goal keeps changing” — the spike protein itself can vary amongst different viral strains — “and that could make the vaccine ineffective,” says David Gifford, an MIT professor in electrical engineering and computer science and biological engineering, in addition to a coauthor of the paper.
He and his colleagues, accordingly, have taken a unique approach, choosing a unique goal for his or her vaccine: activating the a part of the immune system that unleashes “killer” T cells, which attack cells infected with the virus. A vaccine of this kind is not going to keep people from getting Covid-19, but it surely could keep them from getting very sick or dying.
A key innovation made by this group — which included researchers from MIT, the University of Texas, Boston University, Tufts University, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Acuitas Therapeutics — was to bring machine learning techniques into the vaccine design process. A critical aspect of that process involves determining which parts of SARS-Cov-2, which peptides (chains of amino acids which are the constructing blocks of proteins), should go into the vaccine. That entails sifting through 1000’s of peptides within the virus and picking out just 30 or in order that needs to be incorporated.
But that call has to keep in mind so-called HLA molecules — protein fragments on the surface of cells that function “billboards,” telling immune cells (which lack X-ray vision) what is happening inside other cells. The display of specific protein fragments can indicate, for example, that a certain cell is infected by SARS-Cov-2 and needs to be gotten rid of.
Machine learning algorithms were used to unravel a sophisticated set of “optimization problems,” notes Brandon Carter, a PhD student in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, an affiliate of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), and a lead writer of the brand new paper. The overriding goal is to pick peptides which are present, or “conserved,” in all variants of the virus. But those peptides also must be related to HLA molecules which have a high likelihood of being displayed so that they can alert the immune system. “You wish this to occur in as many individuals as possible to get maximum population coverage out of your vaccine,” Carter says. Moreover, you would like each individual to be covered multiple times by the vaccine, he adds. “Because of this multiple peptide within the vaccine is predicted to be displayed by some HLA in every person.” Achieving these various objectives is a task that might be significantly expedited by machine learning tools.
While that touches on the theoretical end of this project, the most recent results got here from experiments carried out by collaborators on the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, which showed a robust immune response in mice given the vaccine. The mice on this experiment didn’t die but were were “humanized,” meaning that that they had an HLA molecule present in human cells. “This study,” Carter says, “offers proof in a living system, an actual mouse, that the vaccines we devised using machine learning can afford protection from the Covid virus.” Gifford characterizes their work as “the primary experimental evidence that a vaccine formulated on this fashion can be effective.”
Paul Offit, a professor of pediatrics within the Division of Infectious Diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, finds the outcomes encouraging. “Numerous people wonder about what approaches will likely be used to make Covid-19 vaccines in the longer term,” Offit says. “Provided that T cells are critical in protection against severe Covid-19, future vaccines that give attention to inducing the broadest T cell responses will likely be a vital step forward in the subsequent generation of vaccines.”
More animal studies — and eventual human studies — would must be done before this work can usher within the “next generation of vaccines.” The undeniable fact that 24 percent of the lung cells in vaccinated mice were T cells, Gifford says, “showed that their immune systems were poised to fight viral infection.” But one must be careful to avoid too strong of an immune response, he cautions, in order to not cause lung damage.
Other questions abound. Should T-cell vaccines be used as an alternative of, or together with, standard spike protein vaccines? While it could be possible to reinforce existing vaccines by including a T-cell component, Gifford says, “putting two things together will not be strictly additive, as one a part of the vaccine could mask the opposite.”
Nevertheless, he and his colleagues consider their T-cell vaccine has the potential to assist immunocompromised individuals who cannot produce neutralizing antibodies and thus may not profit from traditional Covid vaccines. Their vaccine can also alleviate affected by “long Covid” in individuals who proceed to harbor reservoirs of the virus well after their initial infection.
The mechanism behind current flu vaccines, like current Covid-19 vaccines, is to induce neutralizing antibodies, but those vaccines don’t all the time work for various influenza strains. Carter sees potential for flu vaccines based on a T-cell response, “which can prove to be simpler, providing broader coverage, due to their pan-variance.”
Nor are the methods they’re developing limited to Covid-19 or the flu, he maintains, as they may someday be applied to cancer. Gifford agrees, saying that a T-cell vaccine — designed to maximise immune protection each inside a person and among the many biggest number of people — could turn into a key asset within the fight against cancer. “That’s not throughout the scope of our present study,” he says, “but it surely might be the topic of future work.”
Other MIT contributors to the work were Ge Liu and Alexander Dimitrakakis. The work was supported, partially, by Schmidt Futures and a C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute grant to David Gifford.