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The presentation focus is on the SARS-CoV-2 virus and its variants.
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Immunogenic compositions and methods of their use in eliciting immune responses to coronaviruses, such as SARS-CoV-2 are provided.
While a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Dr. Alex Koglin developed two compounds to create a better vaccine for Tuberculosis (TB). In 2015, Dr. Koglin took an entrepreneurial leave of absence from the Laboratory to start NTXBio, LLC. His objective was to develop and commercialize a TB vaccine based on two compounds he created while a scientist at the Los Alamos. In 2018, a total of 1.5 million people died from TB. According to the World Health Organization TB is the leading infectious disease resulting in death worldwide. Approximately one-quarter of the world’s population is infected with mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacteria that causes TB. Dr. Koglin non-exclusively licensed the two compounds from Los Alamos and began further development of the technology in collaboration with the Government of South Africa and universities to address the need for a vaccine to prevent TB. In their research and development of the compounds there was no evidence of cross resistance between other bacteria and the bacteria that causes TB. The compounds were tested in mouse models and demonstrated they can treat TB. Also, the tests have not shown any of the massive side effects that the current treatments for TB are showing. The company started production of the compounds using current manufacturing processes. Using these processes NTXBio could not produce the compounds at a reasonable price to be available for patients in third world countries. The company shifted to developing a new methodology “invitro synthetic biology” that can increase the production of these compounds and other vaccine molecules in a more affordable way. Dr. Koglin’s startup NTXBio is working to positively influence and secure the world vaccine supply by developing rapid on-demand production of the full spectrum of protein vaccines. Starting with the TB vaccine and advancing to common childhood vaccines, emergency and experimental vaccines such as those needed for COVID-19. NTXBio is capable of accelerated prototyping and manufacturing with increased purity and greater stability while reducing both cost and production time. The newly developed production methodology can be applied to not only the TB compounds licensed from Los Alamos, but also to their compounds that advance vaccine production for other diseases. Their technology produces vaccines fast enough to be fully deployable in areas without the need of specialized storage conditions and response times.
Human-to-swine transmission of influenza A virus (IAV) repeatedly occurs, leading to sustained transmission and increased diversity in swine; human seasonal H3N2 introductions occurred in the 1990s and 2010s and were maintained in North American swine. Swine H3N2 strains were subsequently associated with zoonotic infections, highlighting the need to understand the risk of endemic swine IAV to humans. We quantified antigenic distances between swine H3N2 and human seasonal vaccine strains from 1973 to 2014 using a panel of monovalent antisera raised in pigs in hemagglutination inhibition (HI) assays. Swine H3N2 lineages retained the closest antigenic similarity to human vaccine strains from the decade of incursion. Swine lineages from the 1990s were antigenically more similar to human vaccine strains of the mid-1990s but had substantial distance from recent human vaccine strains. In contrast, lineages from the 2010s were closer to human vaccine strains from 2011 and 2014 and the most antigenically distant from human vaccine strains prior to 2007. HI assays using ferret antisera demonstrated that swine lineages from the 1990s and 2010s had significant fold reductions compared to the homologous HI titer of the nearest pandemic preparedness candidate vaccine virus (CVV) or seasonal vaccine strain. The assessment of postinfection and postvaccination human serum cohorts demonstrated limited cross-reactivity to swine H3N2 from the 1990s, especially in older adults born before the 1970s. We identified swine strains to which humans are likely to lack population immunity or are not protected against by a current human seasonal vaccine or CVV to use in prioritizing future human CVV strain selection.
Chicken infectious anemia virus (CIAV) can be transmitted through contaminated live poultry vaccine. However, the pathogenicity of contaminated CIAV strains is rarely reported. Previously, the chickens showed the typical symptoms of anemia after using the attenuated live fowl pox virus (FPV) vaccine. Therefore, exogenous CIAV contamination was suspected. We detected anti-CIAV antibodies in SPF chicks vaccinated with the FPV vaccine. CIAV contamination was confirmed in the FPV vaccine, and the CIAV strain was named JS2020-FPV. This study aims to rescue JS2020-FPV by reverse genetic assays and investigate its pathogenicity. Firstly, double-copies infectious clone of JS2020-FPV was constructed. For the pathogenicity study, infectious clone of JS2020-FPV was used to inoculate 1-day-old SPF chicks. The typical symptoms of anemia were observed in the JS2020-PFV group 14 days post inoculation. The hematocrit and body weight of chicks in the JS2020-PFV group were significantly lower than those in the mock group. Notably, the thymus development index and antibody levels of NDV were lower in chicks in the JS2020-PFV group than those in the mock group. Different degrees of apoptosis of MSB1 and DF-1 were observed after inoculated with the JS2020-FPV VP3 recombinant fusion protein expressed by E. coli system, indicating that VP3 induced apoptosis in the transformed cells. Overall, the pathogenicity of the CIAV detected in the contaminated vaccine was confirmed by inoculating SPF chicks with the double-copies infectious DNA clone in this study. Our findings indicate that the dangers of vaccine contamination cannot be ignored.