Results from the funded study: Immunity, Pathogenesis, and Potential for Immune Escape of Variants of Concern
Pillar 3
Virology
mRNA-based vaccines are currently the most widely used vaccines for COVID-19. Challenges surrounding these novel vaccines such as mRNA-based vaccine hesitancy, production costs and demand, delivery, and unknown longevity of protection have highlighted the need for alternative vaccine strategies.
In this preprint, not yet per-reviewed, the research team outlines how they recently developed an alternative vaccine that uses a safe vesicular stomatitis virus-based vaccine that delivers a key SARS-CoV-2 protein to our immune system to train it to recognize and prevent SARS-CoV-2 infection. They report the development of modifications to this vaccine to allow for the targeting of SARS-CoV-2 variants. This modified vaccine delivers the Spike protein from the original SARS-CoV-2 isolate, Beta variant, Delta variant or a combination of all three variants (“trivalent”).
They showed that mice vaccinated with these vaccines, and especially the trivalent vaccine, induced antibodies that potently neutralized SARS-CoV-2 viruses including the Omicron variant. In addition, these vaccines all induced a strong cellular response to the virus, which is critical for destroying infected cells in the body. This work identifies VSV-based vaccines as an important viable alternative to mRNA-based vaccines for COVID-19.