On Aug. 7, 2020, scientists at Scripps Research announced they had obtained high-resolution, atomic-scale details of the structure of a SARS-CoV-2 ‘spike’ protein from an experimental COVID-19 vaccine details that are consistent with the robust neutralizing antibody responses the vaccine elicited in preclinical and phase 1 clinical studies.

The experimental vaccine, NVX-CoV2373, was developed and tested in clinical trials by the vaccine maker Novavax. It used lab-grown copies of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein to stimulate neutralizing antibody responses to this key viral protein, with the goal of blocking new COVID-19 infections.

The new structural details, obtained using low-temperature electron microscope techniques, are available in the manuscript submitted to the open-access preprint repository bioRxiv. The molecular map of the Novavax spike protein could be helpful in evaluating the vaccine’s ongoing human clinical trial results.

“Our findings suggest that the speedy design and manufacture of this vaccine did not compromise the quality of the spike protein structure,” says the study’s senior author Andrew Ward, PhD, a professor in the Department of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology at Scripps Research.

Novavax also submitted data from the phase 1 clinical trial to a peer-reviewed scientific journal.