Highly Thermotolerant SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine Elicits Neutralising Antibodies Against Delta and Omicron in Mice

Abstract

As existing vaccines fail to completely prevent COVID-19 infections or community transmission, there is an unmet need for vaccines that can better combat SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern (VOC). We have previously developed highly thermo-tolerant monomeric and trimeric receptor binding domain derivatives that can withstand 100{degrees}C for 90 minutes and 37{degrees}C for four weeks, and help eliminate cold chain requirements. We show that mice immunised with these vaccine formulations elicit high titres of antibodies that neutralise SARS-CoV-2 variants VIC31 (with Spike: D614G mutation), Delta and Omicron (BA.1.1) VOC. Compared to VIC31, there was an average 14.4-fold reduction in neutralisation against BA.1.1 for the three monomeric antigen-adjuvant combinations, and 16.5-fold reduction for the three trimeric antigen-adjuvant combinations; the corresponding values against Delta were 2.5 and 3.0. Our findings suggest that monomeric formulations are suitable for the upcoming Phase I human clinical trials, and that there is potential for increasing efficacy with vaccine matching to improve responses against emerging variants. These findings are consistent with in silico modelling and AlphaFold predictions which show that while oligomeric presentation can be generally beneficial, it can make important epitopes inaccessible, and also carries the risk of eliciting unwanted antibodies against the oligomerisation domain.