Development of an inactivated vaccine candidate for SARS-CoV-2

By Q. Gao, L. Bao, H. Mao, Lin Wang, K. Xu, Minnan Yang, Yajing Li, Ling Zhu, Nan Wang, Zhe Lv and 24 more. Science, 2020

1,289 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Vaccine candidate tested in monkeys Global spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has led to an urgent race to develop a vaccine. Gao et al. report preclinical results of an early vaccine candidate called PiCoVacc, which protected rhesus macaque monkeys against SARS-CoV-2 infection when analyzed in short-term studies. The researchers obtained multiple SARS-CoV-2 strains from 11 hospitalized patients across the world and then chemically inactivated the harmful properties of the virus. Animals were immunized with one of two vaccine doses and then inoculated with SARS-CoV-2. Those that received the lowest dose showed signs of controlling the infection, and those receiving the highest dose appeared more protected and did not have detectable viral loads in the pharynx or lungs at 7 days after infection. The next steps will be testing for safety and efficacy in humans. Science, this issue p. 77 Preclinical results of an early vaccine candidate that protected rhesus macaque monkeys against SARS-CoV-2 infection are presented. The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has resulted in an unprecedented public health crisis. Because of the novelty of the virus, there are currently no SARS-CoV-2–specific treatments or vaccines available. Therefore, rapid development of effective vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 are urgently needed. Here, we developed a pilot-scale production of PiCoVacc, a purified inactivated SARS-CoV-2 virus vaccine candidate, which induced SARS-CoV-2–specific neutralizing antibodies in mice, rats, and nonhuman primates. These antibodies neutralized 10 representative SARS-CoV-2 strains, suggesting a possible broader neutralizing ability against other strains. Three immunizations using two different doses, 3 or 6 micrograms per dose, provided partial or complete protection in macaques against SARS-CoV-2 challenge, respectively, without observable antibody-dependent enhancement of infection. These data support the clinical development and testing of PiCoVacc for use in humans.

Subfields: Infectious Diseases

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a12a90ccceca31d89e4543ebb878891ccf2e6e43

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In Infectious Diseases

1. Alessandro Sette
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Citations in the corpus

• Antigen-Specific Adaptive Immunity to SARS-CoV-2 in Acute COVID-19 and Associations with Age and Disease Severity (2020, neutral): “…titers were associated with protection against SARS-CoV-2 in non-human primate infection and rechallenge studies (Chandrashekar et al., 2020; Gao et al., 2020), as well as in three candidate COVID-19 vaccine studies in non-human primates (Gao et al., 2020; Wang et al., 2020c; Yu et al., 2020).”
• COVID-19 neutralizing antibodies predict disease severity and survival (2020, neutral): “A multitude of vaccines are presently being evaluated for SARS-CoV-2 prevention, including inactivated virus (Gao et al., 2020), spike antigen (Jackson et al.”
• Adaptive immunity to SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 (2021, neutral): “Several non-human primate COVID-19 vaccine studies are consistent with the possibility of COVDI-19 vaccines preventing severe disease in humans but possibly not preventing URT infection (Corbett et al., 2020; van Doremalen et al., 2020; Gao et al., 2020; Guebre-Xabier et al., 2020; Mercado et al., 2”
• A Thermostable mRNA Vaccine against COVID-19 (2020, neutral): “It has been reported that two or three doses of inactivated SARS-CoV-2 virus vaccine could induce neutralizing antibodies at levels of 1/50, which provides full protection against SARS-CoV-2 in rhesus macaques (Gao et al., 2020).”
• Effect of an Inactivated Vaccine Against SARS-CoV-2 on Safety and Immunogenicity Outcomes: Interim Analysis of 2 Randomized Clinical Trials. (2020, neutral): “Geometric mean titer (95% CI) 415 (288-597) 349 (258-472) 311 (229-422) 10 (10-10) 74 (56-97) 10 (10-10) 215 (157-296) 10 (10-10)”