ISRAEL CLAIMS ITS COVID-19 VACCINE PASSES TEST ON HAMSTERS

A single dose of a vaccine developed at the Israel Institute for Biological Research protects Syrian golden hamsters against the disease, the ISRAEL 21c magazine said on June 21, 2020.

The magazine said the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine developed at the Israel Institute for Biological Research (IIBR) provides protection against COVID-19 among Syrian golden hamsters. The recombinant VSV-∆G-spike vaccine “results in rapid and potent induction of neutralizing antibodies against SARS-CoV-2,” the authors of a paper published on June 19 claimed.

Two groups of hamsters were used in the study. One group received the vaccine before being infected with the novel coronavirus. The other group was not immunized beforehand.

Hamsters that received a single dose of the experimental vaccination didn’t lose body weight as did unvaccinated hamsters in the control group and their lungs “showed only minor lung pathology, and no viral load” while the unvaccinated hamsters had extensive lung tissue damage and high viral loads. “Taken together, we suggest recombinant VSV-∆G-spike as a safe, efficacious and protective vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 infection,” the authors stressed. They noted that more than 90 vaccines are being developed rapidly in a variety of countries using a variety of technologies. “Among them are RNA and DNA vaccines, viral vectored vaccines, recombinant proteins, live attenuated and inactivated vaccines. Currently, none of these candidates have been approved. Here, we designed an rVSV-based vaccine (rVSV-∆G-spike), in which the VSV-G protein is replaced with the SARS-CoV-2 S protein, creating a recombinant replicating virus.”