Sugar coatings aren’t only for candies; they also help viruses, like the ones that cause COVID-19, hide from their hosts’ immune system. Now, researchers have developed a universal vaccine that targets coronaviruses and the sugars that they use as cover.
The article doesn’t explain how these glycans get dissolved and also if they’re from host cells, don’t the healthy cells need the glycans?
How would the mechanism that does the enzymatic digestion only target the glycans on viruses and not in healthy cells I wonder?