Washington: A new Zika vaccine candidate has potential to protect against the virus with a single dose and is the first to show long-lasting protection in animals
without the use of a live virus, a new study has claimed.
Preclinical tests showed promising immune responses in both mice and monkeys, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania in the US said. "We observed rapid and durable protective immunity without adverse events, and so we think this candidate vaccine represents a promising strategy for the global fight against Zika virus. We hope to start clinical trials in 12 to 18 months," said Drew Weissman, Professor at Penn.
Prompted by the recent Zika virus outbreaks in Latin America and some parts of the US, scientists around the world have been racing to develop candidate vaccines and already several have been tested in animals. Traditional viral vaccines contain a weakened or killed version of the virus or isolated viral proteins.
By contrast, the new Zika candidate vaccine uses tiny strands of RNA that
hold the genetic codes for making viral proteins. These RNA molecules are modified versions of the so-called messenger RNAs (mRNAs) that normally carry
information from genes and serve as blueprints for the making of proteins within cells.
In this case, the mRNAs - produced and purified in a laboratory or biotech production facility - are delivered like a normal vaccine in an injection. Injected mRNAs normally would be cleared from the body within minutes by a patient's immune system, but these mRNAs are modified so that they are ignored by the immune system and can easily enter cells.
Once inside cells, they are taken up by cellular protein-making machinery and induce the production, over weeks, of the viral proteins they encode. Live virus vaccines - using slow-replicating versions of the virus they are meant to protect against - tend to induce much more powerful immune protection compared to vaccines that are based on non-replicating versions of a virus or isolated viral proteins.
Live virus vaccines have serious potential drawbacks, though, including harmful infection with the virus in people who have weakened immune systems. The new candidate vaccine contains mRNAs encoding two key proteins from a Zika virus strain isolated in a 2013 outbreak.
The researchers found that in mice, a single injection of 30 millionths of a grammes of these mRNAs - a small fraction of the dose used for a typical vaccine - induced a rapid immune response, which protected mice from intravenous exposure to a separate Zika strain two weeks later. That protection, resulting in zero detectable virus in the bloodstream a few days after exposure, was maintained even when the mice were exposed to Zika virus five months after vaccination.
Tests in macaque monkeys also showed that a single vaccine dose of only 50 microgrammes provided strong protection against exposure to Zika virus five weeks later. The study appears in the journal Nature.
