Enhancing protective immunity to malaria with a highly immunogenic virus-like particle vaccine
By K. Collins, R. Snaith, Matthew G. Cottingham, S. Gilbert, A. Hill. 2017
227 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The leading malaria vaccine in development is the circumsporozoite protein (CSP)-based particle vaccine, RTS,S, which targets the pre-erythrocytic stage of Plasmodium falciparum infection. It induces modest levels of protective efficacy, thought to be mediated primarily by CSP-specific antibodies. We aimed to enhance vaccine efficacy by generating a more immunogenic CSP-based particle vaccine and therefore developed a next-generation RTS,S-like vaccine, called R21. The major improvement is that in contrast to RTS,S, R21 particles are formed from a single CSP-hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg) fusion protein, and this leads to a vaccine composed of a much higher proportion of CSP than in RTS,S. We demonstrate that in BALB/c mice R21 is immunogenic at very low doses and when administered with the adjuvants Abisco-100 and Matrix-M it elicits sterile protection against transgenic sporozoite challenge. Concurrent induction of potent cellular and humoral immune responses was also achieved by combining R21 with TRAP-based viral vectors and protective efficacy was significantly enhanced. In addition, in contrast to RTS,S, only a minimal antibody response to the HBsAg carrier was induced. These studies identify an anti-sporozoite vaccine component that may improve upon the current leading malaria vaccine RTS,S. R21 is now under evaluation in Phase 1/2a clinical trials.
Subfields: Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health, Virology
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Citations in the corpus
- Induction of Potent Neutralizing Antibody Responses by a Designed Protein Nanoparticle Vaccine for Respiratory Syncytial Virus (2019, methodology): “To determine whether the lower anti-I53-50 responses were due to physical shielding (Collins et al., 2017), we used sera from the animals immunized with unmodified I53-50 to analyze antibody binding to the nanoparticles displaying DS-Cav1.”