A Novel Influenza Vaccine with Enhanced Immunogenic Hemagglutinin Stalk Domain
Abstract
Influenza vaccines are the most cost-effective intervention to prevent influenza viral infection. Influenza viral infection annually causes approximately 500,000 deaths and 5 million clinical illnesses. The efficacy of current vaccines requires a precise match between the vaccine strains and the circulating virus strains. A mismatch, which happens from time to time, results in a great drop in vaccine efficacy. To address this issue, we aim to develop a new influenza vaccine with broad neutralizing activity. Influenza virus hemagglutinin (HA) stalk domain is highly conserved between strains, and stalk-specific antibodies have been shown to protect against heterologous influenza virus challenge. Thus, the HA stalk domain is the prime candidate for developing a broad neutralizing vaccine. However, the stalk domain has inherently poor immunogenicity. Therefore, the central problem here is to improve the immunogenicity of the stalk domain. Our study will develop a novel vaccine candidate that has precise “chemical mutations” on the HA stalk domain via a genetic code expansion technology. This will lead to a robust method to selectively increase the immunogenicity of specific epitopes in viral antigens.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Oct 29, 2018
- Source ID
- W81XWH1810076
Entities
People
- Rong Hai
Organizations
- United States Army
- University of California, Riverside