Recombinant viruses as vaccines against viral diseases

Abstract

Vaccine approaches to infectious diseases are widely applied and appreciated. Amongst them, vectors based on recombinant viruses have shown great promise and play an important role in the development of new vaccines. Many viruses have been investigated for their ability to express proteins from foreign pathogens and induce specific immunological responses against these antigens in vivo. Generally, gene-based vaccines can stimulate potent humoral and cellular immune responses and viral vectors might be an effective strategy for both the delivery of antigen-encoding genes and the facilitation and enhancement of antigen presentation. In order to be utilized as a vaccine carrier, the ideal viral vector should be safe and enable efficient presentation of required pathogen-specific antigens to the immune system. It should also exhibit low intrinsic immunogenicity to allow for its re-administration in order to boost relevant specific immune responses. Furthermore, the vector system must meet criteria that enable its production on a large-scale basis. Several viral vaccine vectors have thus emerged to date, all of them having relative advantages and limits depending on the proposed application, and thus far none of them have proven to be ideal vaccine carriers. In this review we describe the potential, as well as some of the foreseeable obstacles associated with viral vaccine vectors and their use in preventive medicine. Correspondence

A Vesicular Stomatitis Virus-Based Hepatitis B Virus Vaccine Vector Provides Protection against Challenge in a Single Dose

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Construction and immune response characterization of a recombinant pseudorabies virus co-expressing capsid precursor protein (P1) and a multiepitope peptide of foot-and-mouth disease virus in swine

“…Live vaccines based on recombinant viruses represent a particularly promising avenue of vaccine research, both for improving existing vaccines and for developing new ones [13,14,[23][24][25]. For development of recombinant vaccines against swine infectious diseases, live attenuated PRV has been shown to be an excellent vector for expression and delivery of heterologous antigens [15][16][17][24][25][26][27].…”

Synthetic and Adenovirus Delivered Small Interference RNA Pools Targeting Conserved Regions of Foot-and-Mouth Disease Virus

“…They are relatively stable and easy to manipulate and can be obtained in high titers. Adenovirus vectors can be administered by various routes such as intranasal, oral, intraperitoneal, intravenous, intramuscular, and subcutaneous (13), and therefore, can be effectively applied in animals as well. Researchers have reported inhibition of FMDV replication using adenovirus expressing RNAi (12).…”