Pre-clinical Vaccine Development for Emerging and Re-emerging Infectious Diseases

National Institute Of Allergy And Infectious Diseases

Investigators

Linked publications & trials

Abstract

The Virology Core has collaborated with other intramural NIAID labs help to develop a pan-coronaviruses spike protein subunit vaccine. During the past year, we focused on developing the vaccine vaccines against most subecoviruses or beta-coronaviruses. We successfully constructed hybrid immunogens of the MERS-CoV Spike or the subunits of the spike, RBD or S1, fused with SARS-CoV2 spike or its subunit proteins tandemly. The hybrid immunogens contained both epitopes of the two viruses in one protein. In addition, we also tried to load the target immunogen proteins on various VLPs to form potentially more immunogenic vaccine candidates. The purified hybrid proteins, loaded VLPs and the plasmid DNA encoding those immunogens will be tested in animals. Small animal studies for evaluating the potency of the candidates are actively on-going. For continuing isolation of the high potency and breadth of anti-Coronavirus monoclonal antibody (mAb) from immunized animals, we are using specific spike subunit probes (S2P spike, S1 or RBD) for screening and cloning B cells from Covid-19 vaccine immunized animals. Some mAbs specific binding to various Covid-19 variants and other coronaviruses have been successfully isolated. We continue doing more screening assays, including sequencing, EM and pseudoviruses neutralizing of covid-19 variants and different coronaviruses to characterize all those mAbs.