Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine have developed a novel synthetic DNA vaccine that has been shown to induce protective immunity, for the first time, against the virus responsible for the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS).
In a study published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, David Weiner and colleagues detailed how the experimental vaccine can protect rhesus macaque monkeys fully from MERS when administered six weeks prior to being exposed to the MERS virus. At the same time, the vaccine was also found to be capable of producing possibly protective antibodies in the blood of camels.
The MERS virus belongs to the same coronavirus family as the viruses responsible for the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which led to an outbreak in China in 2003 and the common cold. It was first identified in 2012 and was named as such because it originated from the Middle East.
MERS has now affected more than 1,300 people and claimed the lives of over 400. One of the more pronounced outbreaks was recorded in South Korea earlier in the year, which resulted in over 181 infections and over 30 deaths. This was the first time that an outbreak was reported outside of the Middle East and it highlighted even more the need for antiviral treatments or vaccines that can prevent people from getting sick.
The vaccine Weiner and colleagues developed was able to prevent MERS from taking hold on monkeys and provided benefit to all of the animals involved in the study by minimizing symptoms associated with the disease. Additionally, the vaccine also induced antibody production in camels. As camels are the species primarily thought to be the reason how humans have been infected by the MERS virus, this result offers hope that the transmission cycle for the disease can be broken by the vaccine.
"This simple synthetic vaccine has the potential to overcome important production and deployment limitations," said Karuppiah Muthumani, the first author for the study, adding that the vaccine doesn't pose the threat of spreading to non-targeted individuals as it is non-live.
The study received funding support from Inovio Pharmaceuticals and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
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