• Qingrui Huang, Kai Ji, Siyu Tian, Fengze Wang, Baoying Huang, Zhou Tong, Shuguang Tan, Junfeng Hao, Qihui Wang, Wenjie Tan, George F Gao, and Jinghua Yan.
• CAS Key Laboratory of Microbial Physiological and Metabolic Engineering, Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
• Nat Commun. 2021 Feb 3; 12 (1): 776.

AbstractThe rapid expansion of the COVID-19 pandemic has made the development of a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine a global health and economic priority. Taking advantage of versatility and rapid development, three SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccine candidates have entered clinical trials with a two-dose immunization regimen. However, the waning antibody response in convalescent patients after SARS-CoV-2 infection and the emergence of human re-infection have raised widespread concerns about a possible short duration of SARS-CoV-2 vaccine protection. Here, we developed a nucleoside-modified mRNA vaccine in lipid-encapsulated form that encoded the SARS-CoV-2 RBD, termed as mRNA-RBD. A single immunization of mRNA-RBD elicited both robust neutralizing antibody and cellular responses, and conferred a near-complete protection against wild SARS-CoV-2 infection in the lungs of hACE2 transgenic mice. Noticeably, the high levels of neutralizing antibodies in BALB/c mice induced by mRNA-RBD vaccination were maintained for at least 6.5 months and conferred a long-term notable protection for hACE2 transgenic mice against SARS-CoV-2 infection in a sera transfer study. These data demonstrated that a single dose of mRNA-RBD provided long-term protection against SARS-CoV-2 challenge.

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