Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Review
. 2024 Nov 6:15:1434181.
doi: 10.3389/fphar.2024.1434181. eCollection 2024.

COVID-19 vaccines: current and future challenges

Affiliations
Review

COVID-19 vaccines: current and future challenges

Davood Mohammadi et al. Front Pharmacol. .

Abstract

As of December 2020, around 200 vaccine candidates for Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) are being developed. COVID-19 vaccines have been created on a number of platforms and are still being developed. Nucleic acid (DNA, RNA) vaccines, viral vector vaccines, inactivated vaccines, protein subunit vaccines, and live attenuated vaccines are among the COVID-19 vaccine modalities. At this time, at least 52 candidate vaccines are being studied. Spike protein is the primary protein that COVID-19 vaccines are targeting. Therefore, it is critical to determine whether immunizations provide complete or fractional protection, whether this varies with age, whether vaccinated people are protected from reoccurring diseases, and whether they need booster shots if they've already been inoculated. Despite the enormous achievement of bringing several vaccine candidates to market in less than a year, acquiring herd immunity at the national level and much more so at the global level remains a major challenge. Therefore, we gathered information on the mechanism of action of presently available COVID-19 vaccines in this review and essential data on the vaccines' advantages and downsides and their future possibilities.

Keywords: COVID-19; coronavirus disease (COVID)-19; immunity; vaccination; vaccine.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1
The currently under consideration platforms used in producing COVID-19 vaccines. Most of these platforms are based on the components of SARS-CoV-2; however, the structure-based COVID-19 vaccines are easier to access and manufacture due to their similarity to previously approved viral vaccines.

References

    1. AbdulRahman A. S., Faten F. M., Asmaa A. M. (2024). “SARS-CoV-2 secondary spillover: from doubt to evidence,” in Current topics in zoonoses. Editor Alfonso J. R.-M. (Rijeka: IntechOpen; ). Available at: https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/89040
    1. Ahmed S. F., Quadeer A. A., McKay M. R. (2020). Preliminary identification of potential vaccine targets for the COVID-19 coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) based on SARS-CoV immunological studies. Viruses 12 (3), 254. 10.3390/v12030254 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Amanat F., Krammer F. (2020). SARS-CoV-2 vaccines: status report. Immunity 52 (4), 583–589. 10.1016/j.immuni.2020.03.007 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Andreadakis Z., Kumar A., Román R. G., Tollefsen S., Saville M., Mayhew S., et al. (2020). The COVID-19 vaccine development landscape. Nat. Rev. Drug Discov. 19, 305–306. 10.1038/d41573-020-00073-5 - DOI - PubMed
    1. Angyal A., Longet S., Moore S. C., Payne R. P., Harding A., Tipton T., et al. (2022). T-cell and antibody responses to first BNT162b2 vaccine dose in previously infected and SARS-CoV-2-naive UK health-care workers: a multicentre prospective cohort study. Lancet Microbe 3 (1), e21–e31. 10.1016/S2666-5247(21)00275-5 - DOI - PMC - PubMed

Grants and funding

The author(s) declare that no financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

LinkOut - more resources