Professor Nigel Temperton has been keeping busy in Pharmacy’s Viral Pseudotype Unit (VPU) where they have been creating safe pseudotype virus’ (PVs) for use on testing the efficacy of frontline treatments for Covid-19. The SARS-CoV-2 pseudotype virus (PV) developed at VPU is a safe synthetic mimic of the virus which makes it possible for researchers to carry out testing with minimal risk and reduces the need for high-containment laboratory facilities for handling the natural “wildtype” virus the PV.
He is currently working with Imperial College on potential therapeutics to help neutralise the virus in patients with Covid-19 (Funded by UKRI/MRC), the University of Cambridge Vet School and DIOSynVax, studying the immunity effectiveness of digitally designed CoV-2 vaccines (funded by the Gates foundation and Innovate UK) and the University of Oxford Medawar Pathogen Research screening blood donors in seroprevalence studies, and to screen convalescent patient sera as a new form of front line treatment until a vaccine is available and licenced.
The PV incorporates the SARS-CoV-2 Spikes on its surface, and a quantifiable reporter, firefly luciferase within its core, enabling sensitive, and high-throughput cell entry-based assays to be performed. These include neutralisation assays to measure how good monoclonal antibodies, or post-vaccination sera is at preventing cell entry (driven by the virus Spike), a direct measure of their efficacy. The virus neutralization assays performed using PV use micro amounts of patient serum and enable the study of functional protective responses, which correlate strongly with those measured using matched wildtype virus assays. This results in a significant cost saving for the end-user given the exorbitant infrastructure and staff costs of undertaking serological assays with high-containment viruses of human and animal importance.
Follow VPU’s research on twitter: @ViralPseudotype and on our blog: https://blogs.kent.ac.uk/mspvpuprepare/#
Temperton staff page: https://www.msp.ac.uk/person/nigel-temperton/
Temperton ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7978-3815