Professor Lawrence Young said scientists had managed to “leapfrog” technology and this opened up the path to multi-purpose vaccines, where one shot could target several deadly diseases.
“What's happened here really is out of necessity, we fast tracked various developments both in diagnostics and in vaccines,” he told Sky News.
“A particularly exciting aspect of this are these RNA vaccines that we've heard a lot about.”
Vaccines like the Pfizer jab use RNA strands to programme the body to defend itself against the unique spikes protein that coronavirus uses to attach to cells.
The next generation of the RNA vaccines would programme antibodies that can attach to several different viruses, the virologist and professor of molecular oncology at Warwick Medical School said.
“They're very adaptable and you could actually combine different types of RNA to make a multivalent vaccine, so that you can target different viruses all at the same time. I think what we've seen is a leap - if you like, we've been able to leapfrog the technology.
“I think that's not only going to have an impact on the way that we treat infectious disease, but also the way that we treat other diseases like cancer.”
Cancer vaccines already exist, using RNA messengers to stimulate tailor-made immune responses to cancerous cells.
