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Following a meeting of an advisory panel this week, the World Health Organization (WHO) recommended drugmakers to update their COVID-19 vaccine formulations to reflect the currently dominant SARS-CoV-2 variant, JN.1.
The decision came on Friday after the agency’s technical experts on COVID-19 vaccines met early last week to determine the response of the latest crop of COVID shots to the fast-evolving SARS-CoV-2 virus.
According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Omicron JN.1 became the dominant COVID strain in the U.S. last December, days after the WHO classified it a “variant of interest” despite its low public health impact.
The currently approved COVID vaccines developed by Pfizer (NYSE:PFE), BioNTech (NASDAQ:BNTX), Moderna (NASDAQ:MRNA), and Novavax (NASDAQ:NVAX) are designed to target the XBB.1.5 Omicron subvariant.
The WHO said that the XBB.1.5-targeting vaccines would lose efficacy as the virus continues to evolve from JN.1.
“Given the displacement of XBB lineage variants by JN.1-derived variants, it is likely that, in the near term, circulating SARS-CoV-2 variants will be derived from JN.1,” the agency noted.
While XBB.1.5-targeting vaccines offer limited protection against JN.1, “it is expected that the ability for XBB.1.5 vaccination to protect against symptomatic disease may be less robust as SARS-CoV-2 evolution continues from JN.1,” the WHO said.
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