NEW YORK : Researchers have developed a vaccine that fully protects mice against a lethal dose of MERS, a close cousin of the SARS-CoV2 coronavirus that causes COVID-19.
The vaccine uses a harmless virus to deliver a MERS coronavirus protein into cells to generate an immune response, and may hold promise for developing vaccines against other coronaviruses diseases, including COVID-19, suggests the study published in the journal mBio.
The vaccine is an innocuous parainfluenza virus (PIV5) carrying the "spike" protein that MERS uses to infect cells. All the vaccinated mice survived a lethal dose of the MERS coronavirus. "Our new study indicates that PIV5 may be a useful vaccine platform for emerging coronavirus diseases, including