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 To test their hypothesis, the NIH researchers extracted antibodies from 19 recovering COVID patients and tested them on samples of five different coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2, SARS-CoV-1 and MERS. Of the 55 different antibodies, most zeroed in on parts of the virus that tend to mutate a lot. Just 11 targeted the spine helix.

But those 11 that went after the spine helix worked better, on average, on four of the coronaviruses. (A fifth virus, HCoV-NL63, shrugged off all the antibodies.) The NIH team isolated the best spine-helix antibody, COV89-22, and also tested it on hamsters infected with the latest subvariants of the Omicron variant of COVID. “Hamsters treated with COV89-22 showed a reduced pathology score,” the team found.

The results are promising. “These findings identify a class of… antibodies that broadly neutralize [coronaviruses] by targeting the stem helix,” the researchers wrote.

Don’t break out the champagne quite yet. “Although these data are useful for vaccine design, we have not performed vaccination experiments in this study and thus cannot draw any definitive conclusions with regard to the efficacy of stem helix-based vaccines,” the NIH team warned.

It’s one thing to test a few antibodies on hamsters. It’s another to develop, run trials with and get approval for a whole new class of vaccine. “It is really hard and most things that start out as good ideas fail for one reason or another,” James Lawler, an infectious disease expert at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, told The Daily Beast.

There’s a lot of work to do before a spine-helix vaccine might be available at the corner pharmacy. And there are a lot of things that could derail that work. Additional studies could contradict the NIH team’s results. The new vaccine design might not work as well on people as it does on hamsters.

The new jab could also turn out to be unsafe, impractical to produce or too expensive for widespread distribution. Barton Haynes, a Duke University immunologist, told The Daily Beast he looked at spine-helix vaccine designs last year and concluded they’d be too costly to warrant major investment. The main problem, he said, is that the spine-helix antibodies are less potent and “tough to induce” from their parent B-cells.

The harder the pharmaceutical industry has to work to produce a vaccine, and the more vaccine it has to pack into a single dose in order to compensate for lower potency, the less cost-effective a vaccine becomes for mass-production.

Maybe a spine-helix jab is in our future. Or maybe not. Either way, it’s encouraging that scientists are making incremental progress toward  One that could work for many years on a wide array of related viruses.

COVID for one isn’t going anywhere. And with each mutation, it risks becoming unrecognizable to the current vaccines. What we need is a vaccine that’s mutation-proof.