Preventative Vaccines for Zika Virus Outbreak: Preliminary Evaluation

Kim, Eun; Erdos, Geza; Huang, Shaohua; Kenniston, Thomas; Falo, Louis D.; Gambotto, Andrea

Zika virus (ZIKV) is a mosquito-borne flavivirus of the Flaviviridae family that was first identified in Uganda in 1947. The virus has recently attracted global attention due to its rapid spread from Brazil to other countries in the Americas (Dick et al., 1952; Zanluca et al., 2015) . The ZIKV outbreak in Brazil has been associated with a significant rise in the number of babies born with microcephaly (Zanluca et al., 2015) and neurological disorders such as Guillain-Barré syndrome and has been declared a "Global Emergency" by the World Health Organization (WHO 2016 http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/zika/en/; WHO 2016 http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/statements/2016/ 1st-emergency-committee-zika/en/; CDC 2016 http://www.cdc.gov/ zika/). Concern over the spread of ZIKV to the Northern Hemisphere with its concomitant morbidity is spurring the search for an effective vaccine. ZIKV is related to dengue, yellow fever, Japanese encephalitis, and West Nile viruses (WNV), all of which are arthropod-borne flaviviruses. Like other flaviviruses, ZIKV contains a positive, single-stranded, genomic RNA encoding a polyprotein that is proteolytically processed to yield three structural proteins: the capsid (C), the precursor of membrane (prM), and the envelope (E), and seven nonstructural proteins (NS1, NS2a, NS2b, NS3, NS4a, NS4b, and NS5) (Dick et al., 1952) .