Covid-19 roundup: AstraZeneca team finds a surprise Covid-19 vaccine partner; Biogen conference linked to 300K cases
With questions still swirling over its Covid-19 vaccine’s true efficacy, AstraZeneca is pursuing a surprising approach: combining their adenovirus vaccine with the Russian-backed Sputnik V vaccine.
The British pharma and the Gamaleya Institute, which developed Sputnik V, will explore whether they can increase efficacy by giving an initial dose of one vaccine and then a booster dose of the other.
People can develop immunity to an adenovirus vector itself after the first dose, potentially interfering with the second dose’s effectiveness. But the researchers they can avoid that vector-immunity by combining two different vectors in a single regiment. A similar principle was behind the Sputnik V vaccine itself, which uses both an Ad26 virus and an Ad5 virus.
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