A new study looking at the way human cells activate the immune system in response to SARS-CoV-2 infection could open the door to even more effective and powerful vaccines against the coronavirus and its rapidly emerging variants.

Researchers say it’s the first real look at exactly what types of “red flags” the human body uses to enlist the help of T cells—killers the immune system sends out to destroy infected cells. Until now, COVID vaccines have focused on activating a different type of immune cell, B cells, which are responsible for creating antibodies.

Developing vaccines to activate the other arm of the immune system—the T cells—could dramatically increase immunity against coronavirus, and importantly, its variants.

As reported in the journal Cell, the researchers say current vaccines might lack some important bits of viral material capable of triggering a holistic immune response in the human body. Based on the new information, “companies should reevaluate their vaccine designs,” says Mohsan Saeed, a virologist at Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories (NEIDL) and co-corresponding author of the paper.

Saeed, an assistant professor of biochemistry at the School of Medicine, performed experiments on human cells infected with coronavirus. He isolated and identified those missing pieces of SARS-CoV-2 proteins inside one of the NEIDL’s Biosafety Level 3 (BSL-3) labs.

“This was a big undertaking because many research techniques are difficult to adapt for high containment levels [such as BSL-3],” Saeed says. “The overall coronavirus research pipeline we’ve created at the NEIDL, and the support of our entire NEIDL team, has helped us along the way.”

Saeed got involved when computational geneticists Pardis Sabeti and Shira Weingarten-Gabbay contacted him. They hoped to identify fragments of SARS-CoV-2 that activate the immune system’s T cells.

“The emergence of viral variants, an active area of research in my lab, is a major concern for vaccine development,” says Sabeti, a leader in the Broad Institute’s Infectious Disease and Microbiome Program. She is also a Harvard University professor of systems biology, organismic and evolutionary biology, and immunology and infectious disease, as well as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.

“We swung into full action right away because my laboratory had [already] generated human cell lines that could be readily infected with SARS-CoV-2,” Saeed says. The group’s efforts were spearheaded by two members of the Saeed lab: Da-Yuan Chen, a postdoctoral associate, and Hasahn Conway, a lab technician.

Read the full article about more effective and powerful COVID-19 vaccines by Kate McAlpine at Futurity.