CoronaVac (Sinovac) COVID-19 vaccine-induced molecular changes in healthy human serum by infrared spectroscopy coupled with chemometrics

From the beginning of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic in December of 2019, the disease has infected millions of people worldwide and caused hundreds of thousands of deaths. Since then, several vaccines have been developed. One of those vaccines is inactivated CoronaVac-Sinovac COVID-19 vaccine. In this proof of concept study, we first aimed to determine CoronaVac-induced biomolecular changes in healthy human serum using infrared spectroscopy. Our second aim was to see whether the vaccinated group can be separated or not from the non-vaccinated group by applying chemometric techniques to spectral data. The results revealed that the vaccine administration induced significant changes in some functional groups belonging to lipids, proteins and nucleic acids. In addition, the non-vaccinated and vaccinated groups were successfully separated from each other by principal component analysis (PCA) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA). This proof-of-concept study will encourage future studies on CoronaVac as well as other vaccines and will lead to make a comparison between different vaccines to establish a better understanding of the vaccination outcomes on serum biomolecules.