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Home  >  Medical Research Archives  >  Issue 149  > Increasing Efficacy of Enveloped Whole-Virus Vaccines by In situ Immune-Complexing with the Natural Anti-Gal Antibody
Published in the Medical Research Archives
Jul 2021 Issue

Increasing Efficacy of Enveloped Whole-Virus Vaccines by In situ Immune-Complexing with the Natural Anti-Gal Antibody

Published on Jul 10, 2021

DOI 

Abstract

 

The appearance of variants of mutated virus in course of the Covid-19 pandemic raises concerns regarding the risk of possible formation of variants that can evade the protective immune response elicited by the single antigen S-protein gene-based vaccines. This risk may be avoided by inclusion of several antigens in vaccines, so that a variant that evades the immune response to the S-protein of SARS-CoV-2 virus will be destroyed by the protective immune response against other viral antigens. A simple way for preparing multi-antigenic enveloped-virus vaccines is using the inactivated whole-virus as vaccine. However, immunogenicity of such vaccines may be suboptimal because of poor uptake of the vaccine by antigen-presenting-cells (APC) due to electrostatic repulsion by the negative charges of sialic-acid on both the glycan-shield of the vaccinating virus and on the carbohydrate-chains (glycans) of APC. In addition, glycan-shield can mask many antigenic peptides. These effects of the glycan-shield can be reduced and immunogenicity of the vaccinating virus markedly increased by glycoengineering viral glycans for replacing sialic-acid units on glycans with a-gal epitopes (Gala1-3Galb1-4GlcNAc-R). Vaccination of humans with inactivated whole-virus presenting a-gal epitopes (virusa-gal) results in formation of immune-complexes with the abundant natural anti-Gal antibody that binds to viral a-gal epitopes at the vaccination site. These immune-complexes are targeted to APC for rigorous uptake due to binding of the Fc portion of immunocomplexed anti-Gal to Fcg receptors on APC. The APC further transport the large amounts of internalized vaccinating virus to regional lymph nodes, process and present the virus antigenic peptides for the activation of many clones of virus specific helper and cytotoxic T-cells. This elicits a protective cellular and humoral immune response against multiple viral antigens and an effective immunological memory. The immune response to virusa-gal vaccine was studied in mice producing anti-Gal and immunized with inactivated influenza-virusa-gal. These mice demonstrated 100-fold increase in titer of the antibodies produced, a marked increase in T-cell response, and a near complete protection against challenge with a lethal dose of live influenza-virus, in comparison to a similar vaccine lacking a-gal epitopes. This glycoengineering can be achieved in vitro by enzymatic reaction with neuraminidase removing sialic-acid and with recombinant a1,3galactosyltransferase (a1,3GT) synthesizing a-gal epitopes, by engineering host-cells to contain several copies of the a1,3GT gene (GGTA1), or by transduction of this gene in a replication-defective adenovirus vector into host-cells. Theoretically, these methods for increased immunogenicity may be applicable to all enveloped viruses with N-glycans on their envelope.

Author info

Uri Galili

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