• Lanying Du, Guangyu Zhao, Yongping Lin, Chris Chan, Yuxian He, Shibo Jiang, Changyou Wu, Dong-Yan Jin, Kwok-Yung Yuen, Yusen Zhou, and Bo-Jian Zheng.
• Department of Microbiology, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong SAR, China.
• Vaccine. 2008 Mar 20; 26 (13): 1644-51.

AbstractDevelopment of vaccines against severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) coronavirus (SARS-CoV) is crucial in the prevention of SARS reemergence. The receptor-binding domain (RBD) of SARS-CoV spike (S) protein is an important target in developing safe and effective SARS vaccines. Our previous study has demonstrated that vaccination with adeno-associated virus encoding RBD (RBD-rAAV) induces high titer of neutralizing antibodies. In this study, we further assessed the immune responses and protective effect of the immunization with RBD-rAAV prime/RBD-specific T cell peptide boost. Compared with the RBD-rAAV prime/boost vaccination, RBD-rAAV prime/RBD-peptide (RBD-Pep) boost induced similar levels of Th1 and neutralizing antibody responses that protected the vaccinated mice from subsequent SARS-CoV challenge, but stronger Th2 and CTL responses. No significant immune responses and protective effects were detected in mice vaccinated with RBD-Pep or blank AAV alone. Since T cell epitopes are highly conserved and boosting with peptides may induce the production of effector memory T cells, which may be effective against viruses with mutations in the neutralizing epitopes, our results suggest that the vaccination protocol used may be ideal for providing effective, broad and long-term protection against SARS-CoV infection.

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