• Flavia Chiuppesi, Marcela d'Alincourt Salazar, Heidi Contreras, Vu H Nguyen, Joy Martinez, Yoonsuh Park, Jenny Nguyen, Mindy Kha, Angelina Iniguez, Qiao Zhou, Teodora Kaltcheva, Roman Levytskyy, Nancy D Ebelt, Tae Hyuk Kang, Xiwei Wu, Thomas F Rogers, Edwin R Manuel, Yuriy Shostak, Don J Diamond, and Felix Wussow.
• Department of Hematology and Transplant Center, City of Hope National Medical Center, Duarte, CA, 91010, USA.
• Nat Commun. 2020 Nov 30; 11 (1): 6121.

AbstractModified Vaccinia Ankara (MVA) is a highly attenuated poxvirus vector that is widely used to develop vaccines for infectious diseases and cancer. We demonstrate the construction of a vaccine platform based on a unique three-plasmid system to efficiently generate recombinant MVA vectors from chemically synthesized DNA. In response to the ongoing global pandemic caused by SARS coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), we use this vaccine platform to rapidly produce fully synthetic MVA (sMVA) vectors co-expressing SARS-CoV-2 spike and nucleocapsid antigens, two immunodominant antigens implicated in protective immunity. We show that mice immunized with these sMVA vectors develop robust SARS-CoV-2 antigen-specific humoral and cellular immune responses, including potent neutralizing antibodies. These results demonstrate the potential of a vaccine platform based on synthetic DNA to efficiently generate recombinant MVA vectors and to rapidly develop a multi-antigenic poxvirus-based SARS-CoV-2 vaccine candidate.

36 keywords...

hide…