Researcher identifies adjuvant that prevents vaccine-enhanced respiratory disease in RSV, study finds

A unique adjuvant, a substance that enhances the body’s immune response to toxins and foreign matter, can prevent vaccine-enhanced respiratory disease, a sickness that has posed a major hurdle in vaccine development for respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), according to a study led by the Institute for Biomedical Sciences at Georgia State University. The study suggests that combining this adjuvant, which was created by the research team, with RSV vaccination might prime the body for protective immune responses and prevent inflammatory RSV disease after infection. The findings, published in the journal Virology, could lead to advances in RSV vaccine development. RSV, a common respiratory virus that causes cold-like symptoms, is the leading cause of serious respiratory diseases such as bronchiolitis and pneumonia in children younger than 1 year of age in the United States. Each year in the U.S., an estimated 57,000 children younger than 5 years old are hospitalized with an RSV...