It’s not certain whether the antibody levels established in the study will be able to

predict the success of other vaccines, Goldblatt says, particularly those based on
different technologies. “We don’t want to develop something just for one vaccine
or one kind of vaccine,” says Goldblatt. “We’ve got all these manufacturers around
the world, developing vaccines based on different platforms.”

The Oxford vaccine uses a harmless chimpanzee adenovirus to instruct cells to

make the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, whereas those developed by Moderna and
Pfizer–BioNTech use RNA molecules to do this. Other COVID-19 vaccines
deliver the protein itself or inactivated versions of the entire SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Another team is working out correlates of protection for vaccines supported by the
US government, including those from Moderna and Johnson & Johnson. The
Moderna analysis is expected soon.

Predicting protection
Philip Dormitzer, vice-president and chief scientific officer of viral vaccines at
Pfizer, says it’s not clear whether the high levels of neutralizing antibodies explain
the protection the company’s vaccine offers. Their levels are undetectable in most
people before they receive a second dose, but clinical trials and real-world studies
suggest that the vaccine offers strong protection after one dose. Neutralizing
antibodies also do a poor job at predicting vaccine efficacy against variants, he
says, and their levels wane over time.

Mix-and-match COVID vaccines trigger potent immune response

Dormitizer and other researchers say it’s important to distinguish between

biomarkers that can simply predict the success of vaccines and those that are
responsible for their protective effects. In addition to neutralizing antibodies that
block infection in laboratory assays, vaccines trigger antibodies with other
properties, as well as T cells that kill off infected cells and support other immune
responses. All of these parts of the immune response could have a role in
protection.