Pan-filovirus T-cell vaccine protects mice from Ebola and Marburg

Vaccines that induce protective T-cell responses could protect against members across the filovirus family, according to a study published in the open-access journal PLOS Pathogens by Tomáš Hanke of the University of Oxford, Bette Korber of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and colleagues. Developing an effective vaccine against filovirus outbreaks is an important public health aim. Vaccine candidates being developed for a small number of filoviruses that most commonly cause outbreaks all employ the virus glycoprotein as the vaccine immunogen, which triggers a protective immune response. However, antibodies induced by such glycoprotein vaccines are typically limited to the other members of the same filovirus species. By contrast, T-cell vaccines offer the possibility to design a single pan-filovirus vaccine that protects against all known and even likely existing, but as yet un-encountered, members of the filovirus family. In the new study, Hanke and colleagues constructed vaccines using cross-filovirus immunogens – conserved regions...