Monitoring and immunogenicity of SARS-CoV-2 vaccination of laboratory rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta)

Abstract

The availability of effective vaccines and a high vaccination rate allowed the recent mitigation, or even withdrawal, of many protective measures for containing the SARS CoV-2 pandemic. At the same time, new and highly mutated variants of the virus are found to have significantly higher transmissibility and reduced vaccine efficacy, thus causing high infection rates during the third year of the pandemic. The combination of reduced measures and increased infectivity poses a particular risk for unvaccinated individuals, including animals susceptible to the virus. Among the latter, non-human primates (NHPs) are particularly vulnerable. They serve as important models in various fields of biomedical research and because of their cognitive capabilities, they receive particular attention in animal welfare regulations around the world. Yet, although they played an extraordinarily important role for developing and testing vaccines against SARS-CoV-2, the protection of captive rhesus monkeys against Covid-19 has rarely been discussed. We here report upon twofold mRNA vaccination of a cohort of 19 elderly rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) against infection by SARS-CoV-2. All animals were closely monitored on possible side effects of vaccination, and were tested for neutralising antibodies against the virus. The data show that vaccination of rhesus monkeys is a safe and reliable measure to protect these animals against SARS-CoV-2.

COVID‐19 in a common woolly monkey (Lagothrix lagothricha): First evidence of fatal outcome in a nonhuman primate after natural SARS‐CoV‐2 infection

“…In February 2021, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans at the San Diego Zoo were the first NHPs to receive an experimental COVID‐19 vaccine, but the development of SARS‐CoV‐2 vaccines capable of controlling viral transmission in susceptible hosts should be encouraged (Murphy & Ly, 2021). NHPs have played a key role in development and testing SARS‐CoV‐2 vaccines, proving that their vaccination is a safe and reliable measure to protect them against COVID‐19 (Oh et al, 2023).…”

Dynamics of temporal immune responses in nonhuman primates and humans immunized with COVID-19 vaccines

“…Nonetheless, our results demonstrate the comparative dynamics in antibody response of NHPs after the two-dose vaccination with the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines. Interestingly, a significantly weaker antibody response with an adjusted (lower) dose of Pfizer vaccines in rhesus monkeys, compared to humans, has been reported recently [ 42 ].…”

Immunobiology of COVID-19: Mechanistic and therapeutic insights from animal models

“…Following the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, the development of vaccines and drugs has required conducting relevant animal studies to evaluate their safety and efficacy in vivo. Various NHP models, especially rhesus macaques, have been used to test the efficiency of various SARS-CoV-2 vaccines produced by different technologies, including inactivation technology (A'la et al, 2023;Chen et al, 2021), expression of spike protein or RBD subunits (Guebre-Xabier et al, 2020;Prenafeta et al, 2023), DNA (Yu et al, 2020a), mRNA (Oh et al, 2023;Vogel et al, 2021), and attenuated viral vectors (Feng et al, 2020;Jacob-Dolan et al, 2021). Mouse and hamster models have primarily been applied for testing new vaccines and adjuvants and studying immune protective mechanisms, such as immune stimulating adjuvant chimeric vaccines (Ashhurst et al, 2022), multivalent vaccines (Afkhami et al, 2022), lipid nanoparticle vaccines (Elia et al, 2021), adenovirus vaccines (Port et al, 2023), DC vaccines (Tada et al, 2023), new adjuvants (Machado et al, 2023;Vijayanand et al, 2023) and cross protection (Liu et al, 2023a).…”