Explaining how the vaccine works, study lead author Professor Andrew Pollard, University of Oxford, UK, says: "The new vaccine is a chimpanzee adenovirus viral vector (ChAdOx1) vaccine that expresses the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. It uses a common cold virus (adenovirus) that infects chimpanzees, which has been weakened so that it can't cause any disease in humans, and is genetically modified to code for the spike protein of the human SARS-CoV-2 virus. This means that when the adenovirus enters vaccinated people's cells it also delivers the spike protein genetic code. This causes these people's cells to produce the spike protein, and helps teach the immune system to recognise the SARS-CoV-2 virus."
He continues: "The immune system has two ways of finding and attacking pathogens—antibody and T cell responses. This vaccine is intended to induce both, so it can attack the virus when it's circulating in the body, as well as attacking infected cells.
