Part of: Prelims and GS-III Science and Technology
Context: Researchers at the Indian Institute of Science and Queensland Brain Institute in Australia have developed a mathematical model that predicts how antibodies generated by COVID-19 vaccines confer protection against symptomatic infections.
Key findings
Several vaccines offer a high degree of protection, with some reducing the number of symptomatic infections by over 95% in clinical trials.
The model developed by the team was able to predict the level of protection that would be available after vaccination based on the antibody ‘profile’ of the individual.
The predictions were found to closely match efficacies reported in clinical trials for all the major approved vaccines.
The researchers also observed that vaccine efficacy was linked to a readily measurable metric called antibody neutralisation titre.
This opens up the possibility of using such models to test future vaccines for their efficacy before elaborate clinical trials are launched..
This formalism is yet to be applied to the new variants, including Omicron.
Do you know?
The reason predicting vaccine efficacies has been hard is that the processes involved are complex and operate at many interconnected levels.
Vaccines trigger a number of different antibodies, each affecting virus growth in the body differently.
This, in turn, affects the dynamics of the infection and the severity of the associated symptoms.
Further, different individuals generate different collections of antibodies and in different amounts.
