A COVID-19 vaccine from French company Valneva has yet to complete clinical trials. But it has caught the eye of governments in the UK, Europe and Australia.

One of the vaccine’s main selling points is its apparent ability to mount a more general immune response against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, rather than rely on the spike protein to do this.

The hope is vaccines using this technology would be able to provide protection for longer, rather than keep being reformulated to get ahead of these new variants.

Valneva’s vaccine, called VLA2001, is based on tried and tested vaccine technology. It’s the technology used in the vaccine against poliovirus and in some types of flu vaccines. And the company already has a commercially available Japanese encephalitis vaccine based on the same technology.