Project description:Orally delivered replicating adenovirus (Ad) vaccines have been used for decades to prevent adenovirus serotype 4 and 7 respiratory illness in military recruits, demonstrating exemplary safety and high efficacy. That experience suggests that oral administration of live recombinant Ads (rAds) holds promise for immunization against other infectious diseases, including those that have been refractory to traditional vaccination methods. Live rAds can express intact antigens from free-standing transgenes during replication in infected cells. Alternatively, antigenic epitopes can be displayed on the rAd capsid itself, allowing presentation of the epitope to the immune system both prior to and during replication of the virus. Such capsid-display rAds offer a novel vaccine approach that could be used either independently of or in combination with transgene expression strategies to provide a new tool in the search for protection from infectious disease.
Project description:Seasonal and pandemic influenza remains a constant threat. While standard influenza vaccines have great utility, the need for improved vaccine technologies have been brought to light by the 2009 swine flu pandemic, highly pathogenic avian influenza infections, and the most recent early and widespread influenza activity. Species C adenoviruses based on serotype 5 (AD5) are potent vehicles for gene-based vaccination. While potent, most humans are already immune to this virus. In this study, low seroprevalent species D adenoviruses Ad26, 28, and 48 were cloned and modified to express the influenza virus A/PR/8/34 hemagglutinin gene for vaccine studies. When studied in vivo, these species D Ad vectors performed quite differently as compared to species C Ad vectors depending on the route of immunization. By intramuscular injection, species D vaccines were markedly weaker than species C vaccines. In contrast, the species D vaccines were equally efficient as species C when delivered mucosally by the intranasal route. Intranasal adenovirus vaccine doses as low as 10(8) virus particles per mouse induced complete protection against a stringent lethal challenge dose of influenza. These data support translation of species D adenoviruses as mucosal vaccines and highlight the fundamental effects of differences in virus tropism on vaccine applications.
Project description:Adenovirus Types 4 and 7 (Ad4 and Ad7) are associated with acute respiratory distress (ARD). In order to prevent widespread Ad-associated ARD (Ad-ARD) the United States military immunizes new recruits using a safe and effective lyophilized wildtype Ad4 and Ad7 delivered orally in an enteric-coated capsule. We cloned Ad4 and Ad7 and modified them to express either a GFP-Luciferase (GFPLuc) fusion gene or a centralized influenza H1 hemagglutinin (HA1-con). BALB/c mice were injected with GFPLuc expressing viruses intramuscularly (i.m.) and intranasally (i.n.). Ad4 induced significantly higher luciferase expression levels as compared with Ad7 by both routes. Ad7 transduction was restored using a human CD46+ transgenic mouse model. Mice immunized with serial dilutions of viruses expressing the HA1-con influenza vaccine gene were challenged with 100 MLD 50 of influenza virus. Ad4 protected BALB/c mice at a lower dose by i.m. immunization as compared with Ad7. Unexpectedly, there was no difference in protection by i.n. immunization. Although Ad7 i.m. transduction was restored in CD46+ transgenic mice, protection against influenza challenge required even higher doses as compared with the BALB/c mice. However, Ad7 i.n. immunized CD46+ transgenic mice were better protected as compared with Ad4. Interestingly, the restoration of Ad7 transduction in CD46+ mice did not increase vaccine efficacy and indicates that Ad7 may transduce a different subset of cells through alternative receptors in the absence of CD46. These data indicate that both Ad4 and Ad7 can effectively induce anti-H1N1 immunity against a heterologous challenge using a centralized H1 gene. Future studies in non-human primates or human clinical trials will determine the overall effectiveness of Ad4 and Ad7 as vaccines for influenza.
Project description:Human adenoviruses (HAdVs) cause diverse disease presentations as pathogens and are also used as viral vectors for vaccines and gene therapy products. Pre-existing adaptive immune responses to HAdV are known to influence symptom severity, viral clearance and the success of viral vectored products. Of note, approximately 50% of the UK's adult population has received at least one dose of a chimpanzee adenovirus vectored SARS-CoV-2 vaccine (ChAdOx1) since January 2021. We used FluoroSpot analysis to quantify the interferon-gamma (IFNγ) and interleukin-2 (IL2) responses of healthy blood donors to HAdV species A, B, C, D and F and chimpanzee adenovirus Y25, related to HAdV species E. We find that cellular immune responses to multiple species of human adenovirus are ubiquitous among healthy adult blood donors and that stimulating PBMC with whole hexon peptide libraries induces a significantly greater IFNγ and IL2 response than using selected peptide pools alone. We then compared the cellular immune responses of ChAdOx1 recipients and control donors using PBMC collected in 2021 and found that homotypic and heterotypic IFNγ responses were significantly boosted in ChAdOx1 recipients but not controls. Finally, we show that in PBMC derived from blood donors, IFNγ responses are made to both conserved and variable regions of the hexon protein. Future vaccination campaigns using adenoviral vectored vaccines will need to account for the pre-existing exposure of recipients to both circulating HAdVs and vaccines such as ChAdOx1, which convey polyfunctional antiviral T cell responses to even low seroprevalence HAdV types.
Project description:We examined the possible non-specific effects of novel mRNA- and adenovirus-vector COVID-19 vaccines by reviewing the randomized control trials (RCTs) of mRNA and adenovirus-vector COVID-19 vaccines. We calculated mortality risk ratios (RRs) for mRNA COVID-19 vaccines vs. placebo recipients and compared them with the RR for adenovirus-vector COVID-19 vaccine recipients vs. controls. The RR for overall mortality of mRNA vaccines vs. placebo was 1.03 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.63-1.71). In the adenovirus-vector vaccine RCTs, the RR for overall mortality was 0.37 (0.19-0.70). The two vaccine types differed significantly with respect to impact on overall mortality (p = 0.015). The RCTs of COVID-19 vaccines were unblinded rapidly, and controls were vaccinated. The results may therefore not be representative of the long-term effects. However, the data argue for performing RCTs of mRNA and adenovirus-vector vaccines head-to-head comparing long-term effects on overall mortality.
Project description:Chikungunya virus (CHIKV) is a mosquito-borne virus. The emergence of CHIKV infection has raised global concern, and there is a growing need to develop safe and effective vaccines. Here, adenovirus 5 was used as the vaccine vector to construct recombinant adenoviruses expressing CHIKV E2, E1, and E2-6K-E1, respectively. And then the immunogenicity and protective efficiency against CHIKV were evaluated in BALB/c mice. Compared to the ad-wt control group, all three vaccines elicited significant humoral and cellar immune responses. The levels of neutralizing antibodies in the rAd-CHIKV-E2-6K-E1 and rAd-CHIKV-E2 groups both reached 1:256, which were 3.2 times higher than those in the rAd-CHIKV-E1 group. Furthermore, the levels of lymphocyte proliferation in rAd-CHIKV-E2-6K-E1 group were the highest. Besides, the concentrations of IFN-γ and IL-4 in mice immunized with rAd-CHIKV-E2-6K-E1 were 1.37 and 1.20 times higher than those in ad-wt immunized mice, respectively. After the challenge, mice in the rAd-CHIKV-E2-6K-E1 and rAd-CHIKV-E2 groups lost 2% of their body weight compared with 5% in the ad-wt control group. And low viral loads were detected in the heart, kidney, and blood of mice immunized with rAd-CHIKV-E2-6K-E1 and rAd-CHIKV-E2 at 3-5 dpc, which decreased by 0.4-0.7 orders of magnitude compared with the ad-wt control. Overall, these data suggest that the recombinant adenovirus is a potential candidate vaccine against CHIKV.
Project description:In order to better understand the broad applicability of adenovirus (Ad) as a vector for human vaccine studies, we compared four adenovirus (Ad) vectors from families C (Ad human serotype 5 [HAdV-5; here referred to as AdHu5]), D (HAdV-26; here referred to as AdHu26), and E (simian serotypes SAdV-23 and SAdV-24; here referred to as chimpanzee serotypes 6 and 7 [AdC6 and AdC7, respectively]) of the Adenoviridae. Seroprevalence rates and titers of neutralizing antibodies to the two human-origin Ads were found to be higher than those reported previously, especially in countries of sub-Saharan Africa. Conversely, prevalence rates and titers to AdC6 and AdC7 were markedly lower. Healthy human adults from the United States had readily detectable circulating T cells recognizing Ad viruses, the levels of which in some individuals were unexpectedly high in response to AdHu26. The magnitude of T-cell responses to AdHu5 correlated with those to AdHu26, suggesting T-cell recognition of conserved epitopes. In mice, all of the different Ad vectors induced CD8(+) T-cell responses that were comparable in their magnitudes and cytokine production profiles. Prime-boost regimens comparing different combinations of Ad vectors failed to indicate that the sequential use of Ad vectors from distinct families resulted in higher immune responses than the use of serologically distinct Ad vectors from the same family. Moreover, the transgene product-specific antibody responses induced by the AdHu26 and AdC vectors were markedly lower than those induced by the AdHu5 vector. AdHu26 vectors and, to a lesser extent, AdC vectors induced more potent Ad-neutralizing antibody responses. These results suggest that the potential of AdHu26 as a vaccine vector may suffer from limitations similar to those found for vectors based on other prevalent human Ads.
Project description:Adenoviruses represent the most widely used viral-vectored platform for vaccine design, showing a great potential in the fight against intracellular infectious diseases to which either there is a lack of effective vaccines or the traditional vaccination strategy is suboptimal. The extensive understanding of the molecular biology of adenoviruses has made the new technologies and reagents available to efficient generation of adenoviral-vectored vaccines for both preclinical and clinical evaluation. The novel adenoviral vectors including nonhuman adenoviral vectors have emerged to be the further improved vectors for vaccine design. In this review, we discuss the latest adenoviral technologies and their utilization in vaccine development. We particularly focus on the application of adenoviral-vectored vaccines in mucosal immunization strategies against mucosal pathogens including Mycobacterium tuberculosis, flu virus, and human immunodeficiency virus.
Project description:BackgroundInduction of potent long lasting effector T cell responses against liver stage malaria antigens strongly correlates with protection from malaria. While Adenovirus serotype 5 (Ad5) based malaria vaccine platforms have the ability to induce potent effector T cell responses against transgenes, high rates of pre-existing Ad5 immunity in malaria endemic regions has prompted study of alternative Ad serotype based malaria vaccines as replacements for Ad5 based malaria vaccines. The research described in this article examines the utility of alternative serotype adenovirus serotype 4 (Ad4) expressing a sporozoite surface protein (circumsporozoite protein (CSP)) (Ad4-CSP) to induce immune responses against CSP. The immunogenicity of Ad4-CSP was also tested in homologous and heterologous prime boost vaccinations in both Ad5 naïve and Ad5 immune backgrounds as compared to use of Ad5-CSP.ResultsIn Ad5 naïve animals, use of Ad4-CSP priming vaccinations followed by boosting with Ad5-CSP (Ad4-CSP/Ad5-CSP) maximally increased the numbers of CSP specific cytokine secreting cytotoxic T cells relative to repeated use of Ad5-CSP. The Ad4-CSP/Ad5-CSP regimen also induced equivalent levels of CSP specific cell killing as did homologous prime-boost vaccinations with Ad5-CSP, despite stimulating lower numbers of CSP specific cytotoxic T cells. Priming with Ad4-CSP followed by a homologous boost resulted in significantly less CSP specific humoral responses than any other vaccination regimen tested in Ad naïve animals. In Ad5 immune animals, addition of Ad4-CSP in homologous or heterologous prime boost resulted in inductions of higher CSP specific responses than animals repeatedly vaccinated with Ad5-CSP alone. However, the observed responses were well below those observed in similarly treated Ad naïve mice.ConclusionsWhile the Ad4-CSP/Ad5-CSP and Ad5-CSP/Ad5-CSP vaccination regimens resulted in equivalent CSP specific killing in Ad naïve animals, Ad4-CSP/Ad5-CSP achieved this result with a lower percentage of CSP specific CD8+ T cells and a higher number of IFN? secreting cells, suggesting that the Ad4-CSP/Ad5-CSP vaccination regimen elicits more efficient cytotoxic T cells. In Ad5 immune animals use of Ad4-CSP improved CSP specific immune responses as compared to repeated use of Ad5-CSP, but could not achieve the levels of immunogenicity observed when the same vaccine regimens were used in Ad naïve animals. These data indicate the existence of some level of immunological cross-reactivity between these two adenovirus subgroups. Based on these results, it is suggested that future studies should undertake similarly stringent analyses of alternative Ad serotypes to establish their effectiveness as replacements for Ad5.
Project description:Vaccines against parasites have lagged centuries behind those against viral and bacterial infections, despite the devastating morbidity and widespread effects of parasitic diseases across the globe. One of the greatest hurdles to parasite vaccine development has been the lack of vaccine strategies able to elicit the complex and multifaceted immune responses needed to abrogate parasitic persistence. Viral vectors, especially adenovirus (AdV) vectors, have emerged as a potential solution for complex disease targets, including HIV, tuberculosis, and parasitic diseases, to name a few. AdVs are highly immunogenic and are uniquely able to drive CD8+ T cell responses, which are known to be correlates of immunity in infections with most protozoan and some helminthic parasites. This review presents recent developments in AdV-vectored vaccines targeting five major human parasitic diseases: malaria, Chagas disease, schistosomiasis, leishmaniasis, and toxoplasmosis. Many AdV-vectored vaccines have been developed for these diseases, utilizing a wide variety of vectors, antigens, and modes of delivery. AdV-vectored vaccines are a promising approach for the historically challenging target of human parasitic diseases.