A 'universal vaccine' may soon protect against all coronaviruses, including the common cold

Selected excerpts from the linked article.

Graham and McLellan are part of a corps of researchers hoping to take the technology they used on COVID-19 vaccines and apply them to an even more futuristic creation: an arsenal of off-the-shelf premade vaccines that could be easily modified to attack new pathogens as they arise—a kind of "pan" or "universal" coronavirus vaccine capable of protecting against many different strains of the virus at the same time.

Then the pandemic hit. When Chinese researchers published the genome of COVID-19 in early January, McLellan and Graham quickly pulled out their plans for the MERS vaccine and copied the genetic instructions used to stabilize the virus' grappling-hook protein. Then they incorporated these spike-stiffening genetic tweaks into a vaccine they believed would work against COVID-19 and shipped it off to colleagues at Moderna and some other drug manufacturers. "We started all this before we had the first case in the United States," Graham says.

The company has demonstrated in mice that a single vaccine also in development using this technology can provoke an immune response against SARS2, SARS1 and MERS virus and had the added benefit of protecting against a coronavirus that is responsible for 42 percent of common colds. "If you think about those spike proteins as being the three primary colors, red, yellow and blue, we showed that exposing mice to them could also produce neutralizing antibodies of orange," says Jeff Baxter, the company's CEO.