Rapid Generation and Testing of a Lassa Fever Vaccine Using VaxCelerate Platform.

摘要

In this project, the VaxCelerate Consortium completed the generation and testing of a new vaccine against Lassa fever using its self-assembled vaccine platform. This process, starting with the provision of the genome for the Josiah strain of Lassa by DARPA and ending with the reporting of a validated immunogenicity end point from a transgenic HLA DR3 mouse vaccination model, was completed in 123 days and met its primary immune end point of showing significantly increased CD4+ T cell interferon gamma secretion in response to Lassa peptides. This live fire vaccine test demonstrated the capability of this distributed vaccine development consortium to rapidly produce and test a novel vaccine of relevance to public health responses. In parallel with this effort, the consortium produced and tested a modified version of its self-assembling vaccine protein that used a subunit of the full Mycobacterium tuberculosis heat shock protein 70. This assessment showed that the subunit was soluble but did not show the same potential for inducing DC maturation and cross presentation as the full length protein. This avenue of exploration was therefore concluded.