Preventative Vaccines for Zika Virus Outbreak: Preliminary Evaluation

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

The succesful development of flavivirus vaccines began 80 years ago in 1937 with the yellow fever YFV17D live-attenuated vaccine (Monath, 2008) . Since then, N 600 million people have been vaccinated, with 98% protection and a N10 year persistence of vaccine-induced immunity (Barrett and Teuwen, 2009 ). However, several severe adverse events associated with vaccine administration have been observed over the last 20 years. Thus, a purified, inactivated vaccine has been recently developed and its testing results suggest good immunogenicity and tolerability (Monath et al., 2011) . A few weeks ago, two studies showing immunogenicity of a plasmid DNA or adenovirus (serotype 52) expressing virus-like particles in mice and non-human primates were published Abbink et al., 2016) . Here, to build on these initial findings to develop an effective ZIKV vaccine, we describe the development of a recombinant adenoviral vector expressing codon-optimized ZIKV E antigen and a subunit recombinant ZIKV E vaccine delivered transcutaneously by carboxymethyl cellulose (CMC) microneedle arrays (MNAs) (Bediz et al., 2014; Korkmaz et al., 2015) , investigate their ability to induce neutralizing immune responses, and assess their ability to passively protect against ZIKV challenge in a novel neonatal ZIKV infection mouse model.