First candidate vaccine against new coronavirus
A research team has developed a potential vaccine against the newly emerged coronavirus.
In autumn 2012, the public was alarmed by the emergence of a newly discovered coronavirus. It induces severe courses of disease with shortness of breath and pneumonia which may be fatal. To date, all 108 known and confirmed cases of infection are connected to the Arabian Peninsula, and hence the virus has been termed "Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS-CoV)". Up to now in Germany and other European countries, the virus has only occurred in patients who had previously acquired the infection in the Middle East. The source of infection is currently still unknown, but the virus can evidently transmit from person to person as direct infections of relatives and care-takers of infected patients have shown.
Over the past months, a team led by Professor Gerd Sutter from the Institute for Infectious Diseases and Zoonoses of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU) has developed a potential vaccine against the virus in collaboration with the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam and the Phillips University Marburg. The researchers have reported about this in the Journal of Virology. Sutter says, “The candidate vaccine we have developed is the first one directed against the MERS coronavirus that could be administered to humans, as an emergency measure, in the event of an epidemic”.
Both the LMU in Munich and the Phillips University Marburg are members of the German Centre for Infection Research (DZIF). This newly founded centre aims at combatting infectious diseases with effective agents as quickly as possible through more intense and more interdisciplinary collaboration between infectious disease experts from basic research, epidemiology and clinical practice than ever before. Particularly for outbreaks of new viruses, as is currently the case with the MERS coronavirus, it is crucial to develop new diagnostic agents and vaccines quickly to avoid spreading of the respective viruses.
Development time: less than a year
The new vaccine was developed from the modified vaccinia virus Ankara (MVA). The vaccinia virus had already been generated by the LMU more than 30 years ago to serve as a smallpox vaccine. Today, MVA is used globally for the research and development of vaccines against viral infections and cancer. The MVA virus is molecularly modified to enable a production of antigens for the vaccine from pathogen proteins. This is done by inserting genetic information from the pathogen, so in this case the coronavirus, into the MVA virus genome.
The candidate vaccine MVA-MERS-S developed by Gerd Sutter enables the vaccinated person’s immune system to develop sufficient antibodies to effectively prevent a coronavirus infection. This has been demonstrated in tests with mice. The next step is to now develop an animal model and to confirm that the MVA-MERS-S vaccine can also prevent the severe pneumonia induced by the coronavirus in humans. However, up to now, no animal species as susceptible to the virus as humans is known.
“We have produced the best vaccine possible given the present state of our knowledge,” says Gerd Sutter. “This demonstrates that, using our method, we can fabricate a candidate vaccine within less than a year. MVA-MERS-S could be used as it stands for the production of a vaccine.” If the coronavirus were to suddenly give rise to a full-fledged epidemic, the vaccine could be made available rapidly. The same method could also be used to develop candidate vaccines against other pathogens within a similarly short period of time. (Journal of Virology 2013)
The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) established the German Centre for Infection Research (DZIF) in the year 2011. The DZIF brings together universities, university medical centres, Leibniz and Max Planck Institutes, Helmholtz Centres and other government research establishments with strong profiles in the field of infectious diseases. The Centre aims to discover new paths for the prevention, diagnosis and therapy of infectious diseases.
