Universal Vaccine Platform

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A plug-and-play antigen crosslinking platform to eliminate subtype-bias in vaccines.

About the Technology

Despite the progress made in vaccine development, infectious diseases remain one of the greatest global medical challenges of our time. Vaccine efficacy against rapidly evolving viruses, like influenza, is limited. Vaccination generates antibodies and T cells that control virus infection, but a major limitation of current vaccines is the wide variation in these responses across humans. Thus, it is important to develop novel vaccine modalities to confer ‘broad’ protection against emerging viral variants, especially in at-risk individuals.

The current multivalent vaccines, such as the inactivated influenza vaccine, are formulated to contain multiple viral strains to match and confer protection against all viral variants in circulation. However, due to the phenomenon of ‘subtype-bias’, most individuals elicit a strong response to only one of the strains, rendering them vulnerable to infection by other strains. Our analysis of the seasonal influenza vaccine response in multiple human cohorts identified deficit in T cell ‘help’ as a major driver of this observed subtype-bias. We demonstrate that covalent crosslinking of the antigens can facilitate the recruitment of significantly more T cell help and can largely eliminate subtype-bias, in both a mouse model and a human tonsil organoid system. The antibody response was also significantly better than the inactivated influenza vaccine. Our plug-and-play antigen crosslinking platform can be readily adapted to other virus pathogens, including avian influenza, SARS-CoV-2. The HIT Fund will support critical proof-of-concept experiments in animal models that will facilitate technology licensing.