Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine may provide ‘protection for life’, finds new UK study

A new study in the UK has found that Oxford AstraZeneca vaccines, manufactured and administered in India under the trade name Covishield, offers protection can may last a whole lifetime.

As per the study, the vaccine not just generates antibodies against the SARS-COV-2 virus but also created “training camps” in the body, to enable search-and-destroy T-cells to even kill new variants.

As reported by The Sun, authors of the study are scientists from Oxford, UK and Switzerland. who published in the Nature journal that adenovirus vaccines like those developed Oxford AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson can train the body to continue to make vital T-cells even from a long time after antibodies from the vaccine shot wane. They say it could possibly keep making them for life.

"The T-cells that come from these cellular training camps appear to have a very high level of ‘fitness’,” said, researcher Prof Burkhard Ludewig, of Cantonal Hospital in Switzerland. He continues, “Adenoviruses have co-evolved with humans over a very long time, and learned a lot about the human immune system in the process.”

As per the study’s findings, adenoviruses have the ability to penetrate long-lived tissue cells. These cells, called fibroblastic reticular cells, can act as T-cell “training grounds”.

The new findings add weight to recent studies that showed the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine as more effective at generating the T-cells in comparison to Pfizer and Moderna, which are both mRNA vaccines.

As per Prof Paul Klenerman, of Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Medicine, said: “Millions of people have received adenovirus vaccines around the world. The ultimate goal with these vaccines is the induction of long-term immune system protection using both antibodies and T-cells. This research helps us to understand more on the process of vaccination, and why the effects on killer T-cells are so prolonged.”