Professor Luke O’Neill has hailed a variant-resistant Covid vaccine that is being tested in America.
The US Army is developing the single-shot jab that is said to work against all Covid and SARS variants.
Test results on animals have been “impressive”, according to the professor of biochemistry at Trinity College, who expects data from the phase one trial on humans to be published “any day now”.
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"This is now the Moon shot, they're calling it in a way, the US are all over this,” Prof O’Neill told Pat Kenny on Newstalk.
"Can we make a vaccine that will work against any variant of Covid? There's a massive effort happening in the US at the moment, trying to make what's called a Universal Vaccine. It's a great goal to have,” he said.
Prof O’Neill explained how it protects against Sars - the original virus - as well as Alpha, Beta, Delta, Omicron. He said that while different variants have changing spike proteins, researchers are trying to isolate the one that doesn't.
"So Omicron has this massive variety of changes, basically, and then you see increased infections with Omicron as a result.
"But the question is can you find a piece of the spike that doesn't change? And low and behold a place called the RBD - or Receptor Binding Domain - it's common to all coronaviruses, and now that's the one they're focusing in on in a very clever way,” he said.
Speaking on Thursday, Prof O’Neill said test results on animals have been “impressive” and that data from the phase one trial on humans could be published within days.
"They've taken the RBD... and they've stuck it on a nano-particle - a tiny, tiny particle - made of a thing called ferritin, studded with loads of these RBDs.
"It went into monkeys and amazingly it protects against Sars - the original virus - and Alpha, Beta, Delta, Omicron. It protected against all of those in monkeys.
“They're in the middle of a phase one trial in humans - any day now actually... we're going to get the data from that phase one trial soon.
"That's very, very hopeful that that US Army-derived vaccine could be the first universal vaccine against Covid,” he added.
It comes as 3,035 new Covid cases were reported in Ireland on Thursday, made up of 1,426 positive PCR tests and 1,609 registered Antigen tests.
There are currently 654 patients in hospital with Covid, of which 37 are in ICU.
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