"Not Many Places Left For Covid To Evade Immunity": UK Vaccine Creator
NDTV
"The virus cannot completely mutate because its spike protein has to interact with the ACE2 receptor on the surface of the human cell, in order to get inside it," said Dame Sarah Gilbert, the lead scientist from Oxford University, and the brain behind the vaccine manufactured in India as Covishield
There aren't many places left for the COVID-19 virus to mutate and evade immunity as it will only get weaker with time, said the creator of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, the most widely distributed jab in the world.
"The virus cannot completely mutate because its spike protein has to interact with the ACE2 receptor on the surface of the human cell, in order to get inside it," Dame Sarah Gilbert, the lead scientist from Oxford University, and the brain behind the vaccine manufactured in India as Covishield, said during a webinar titled: 'Vaccines, variants, and infection: The position this winter'' for the Royal Society of Medicine on Wednesday.
"If it changes its spike protein so much that it can't interact with that receptor, then it's not going to be able to get inside the cell. So, there aren't many places for the virus to go to have something that will evade immunity but still remain infectious," she explained.
Comparing the SARS-CoV-2 with other flu viruses and the vaccine modifications made for them annually, she said: "What tends to happen over time is there's just a slow drift, that's what happens with flu viruses. You see small changes accumulating over a period of time and then we have the opportunity to react to that."
