Scientists at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research are expected to announce they have developed a vaccine that is effective against COVID-19 and all its variants, according to Defense One.
The scientists creating the vaccine also claim it protects against previous SARS viruses.
Walter Reed's Spike Ferritin Nanoparticle COVID-19 vaccine (SpFN) completed animal trials earlier this year with positive results.
Dr. Kayvon Modjarrad, director of Walter Reed's infectious diseases branch, told Defense One the first phase of human trials came back with positive results.
The SpFN vaccine uses a ball-shaped protein with 24 faces for its vaccine, allowing scientists to attach the spikes of multiple coronavirus strains on different faces of the protein.
"It's very exciting to get to this point for our entire team, and I think for the entire Army as well," Modjarrad said. "With omicron, there's no way really to escape this virus. You're not going to be able to avoid it."
"We need to evaluate it in the real-world setting and try to understand how does the vaccine perform in much larger numbers of individuals who have already been vaccinated with something else initially … or already been sick," Modjarrad added.
Modjarrad said human trials took longer than expected because the lab needed to test the vaccine on subjects who had both not been vaccinated or previously infected with COVID-19.
The new vaccine will still need to undergo phase 2 and phase 3 trials before being released to the public.
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