Models of RNA virus evolution and their roles in vaccine design

Ojosnegros, Samuel; Beerenwinkel, Niko

Recombinant and peptide-based vaccines. A great variety of vaccine strategies can be catalogued inside this category, most of them experimental. Recombinant vaccines are produced by the expression of a genetic construct that codifies viral peptides [47, 48] , subunits of the virus [49] , or whole viruses with genetic modifications including deletions of key proteins [50, 51] . Other strategies include live viral vectors that carry multiple copies of heterologous proteins of interest [52, 53] . Many of these strategies have failed, mainly because of the low immunogenic capacity of peptides or subunits, compared with the whole live or inactivated particle. The HBV vaccine is a yeast-derived recombinant vaccine. It contains the hepatitis B surface antigen which is one of the viral envelope proteins. HBV vaccine is the only recombinant vaccine currently approved and in use for humans [49] .