Vaccine and adjuvant design for emerging viruses

Abstract

Vaccination is currently the most effective strategy to medically control viral diseases. However, developing vaccines is a long and expensive process, and traditional methods, such as attenuating wild-type viruses by serial passage, may not be suitable for all viruses and may lead to vaccine safety considerations, particularly in the case of the vaccination of particular patient groups, such as the immunocompromised and the elderly. In particular, developing vaccines against emerging viral pathogens adds a further level of complexity, as they may only be administered to small groups of people or only in response to a specific event or threat, limiting our ability to study and evaluate responses. In this commentary, we discuss how novel techniques may be used to engineer a new generation of vaccine candidates as we move toward a more targeted vaccine design strategy, driven by our understanding of the mechanisms of viral pathogenesis, attenuation and the signaling events which are required to develop a lasting, protective immunity. We will also briefly discuss the potential future role of vaccine adjuvants, which could be used to bridge the gap between vaccine safety, and lasting immunity from a single vaccination.

Targeting antigens to CD180 rapidly induces antigen-specific IgG, affinity maturation, and immunological memory

“…In addition, most vaccine strategies require more than one injection to produce sufficient circulating levels of protective Abs. Single dose vaccines provide several advantages (Bowick and McAuley, 2011; Levine, 2011), and one injection of Ag attached to anti-CD180 induces a rapid and strong IgG response. Thus, a single inoculation of a CD180-based vaccine could produce protective humoral immunity and be a particularly attractive approach for therapeutic vaccination shortly after an exposure to a pathogen.…”

Effect of Transmission and Vaccination on Time to Dominance of Emerging Viral Strains: A Simulation-Based Study

“…Moreover, continuing vaccination efforts for populations with low vaccination coverage after the emergence of a vaccine-resistant emergent viral strain was found to lower the TTD value for the emergent viral strain or variant. The novel discoveries from this simulation-based experiment seem counter-intuitive at first because previous studies and public health advisories used vaccination as a strategy to control the the incidence of viral infections [5,11,[17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][42][43][44][45][46]. The rapid dominance of the emergent strain within the infected should not be perceived as the failure of a vaccine, but rather, it is a by-product of the effectiveness of the vaccine.…”

Overview of the current promising approaches for the development of an effective severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) vaccine

“…Generally, possible limitations for vaccine development for other viruses must be taken into consideration for COVID-19 vaccine including a: adverse side effects, b: limitation in usage for the immunocompromised patients, c: reversion to a virulent vaccine in case of using live-attenuated vaccines, d: the need for several booster administrations, and e: the shorter period of protection [141] .…”