‘Vaccine developers often combine two vaccines to combat the same pathogen, and researchers are keen to deploy the strategy — known as a heterologous prime-boost — against the coronavirus. A heterologous prime-boost combination was approved last year by European regulators to protect against Ebola, and experimental HIV vaccines often rely on the strategy, says Dan Barouch, director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts. But it has yet to be tested for vaccines against COVID-19, which are typically given as a repeat injection of the same vaccine.
‘The ability to mix and match vaccines could make vaccination programmes more flexible: it would speed up the process and reduce the impact of any supply-chain disruptions. “It really makes the implementation much more simple,” said Mary Ramsay, head of immunization at Public Health England, at a press briefing on 3 February.’
Read here (Nature, Feb 4, 2021)
