An RNA nanoparticle vaccine against Zika virus elicits antibody and CD8+ T cell responses in a mouse model

• Main Authors: Woodham, Andrew W. (Author), Chahal, Jasdave (Contributor), Fang, Taotao (Contributor), Khan, Omar Fizal (Contributor), Ling, Jingjing (Contributor), Anderson, Daniel Griffith (Contributor), Ploegh, Hidde (Contributor)
• Other Authors: Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research (Contributor), Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT (Contributor)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Nature Publishing Group, 2017-06-20T16:01:30Z.
• Subjects: Article
• Online Access: Get fulltext

 The Zika virus (ZIKV) outbreak in the Americas and South Pacific poses a significant burden on human health because of ZIKV's neurotropic effects in the course of fetal development. Vaccine candidates against ZIKV are coming online, but immunological tools to study anti-ZIKV responses in preclinical models, particularly T cell responses, remain sparse. We deployed RNA nanoparticle technology to create a vaccine candidate that elicited ZIKV E protein-specific IgG responses in C57BL/6 mice as assayed by ELISA. Using this tool, we identified a unique H-2D[superscript b]-restricted epitope to which there was a CD8+ T cell response in mice immunized with our modified dendrimer-based RNA nanoparticle vaccine. These results demonstrate that this approach can be used to evaluate new candidate antigens and identify immune correlates without the use of live virus.