Vaccine Vectors Derived from a Large Collection of Simian Adenoviruses Induce Potent Cellular Immunity Across Multiple Species

ABSTRACT

Whether you’re talking about drafting for a professional sports team or hiring new lab staff, increasing the number of candidates improves your chances of the truly exceptional find. When it comes to vaccine vectors, the pool of human adenovirus candidates has been quite shallow. Although certain vectors are highly immunogenic in animal models, they can be neutralized by preexisting antibodies in humans. Yet, Colloca et al. show that viruses that are more rare in humans and are thus less likely to be neutralized are not as immunogenic.

Therefore, the authors deepened the vector pool by isolating more than 1000 adenovirus strains from chimpanzees. They identified vectors that grew in human cells and were not neutralized by human sera and prevented them from replicating. As with human adenoviral vectors, different simian vectors induced either more or less potent immune responses in mice. The more potent of these vectors were also immunogenic in humans. These chimp adenoviral vectors provide such embarrassment of riches that different vectors could be used for each vaccine target, lowering the chances of subsequent cross-reactive neutralization. Thus, these vectors serve as prime candidates for future vaccine development.

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