Unconventional design approach shows promise for new herpes vaccine

Herpes is one of the most common sexually transmitted diseases, affecting close to 500 million people worldwide, yet an effective vaccine against the pernicious virus has eluded scientists for decades. However, Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine have now designed a new vaccine that was able to prevent both the active and latent infection stages of herpes simplex virus type 2 (HSV-2). “Developing a herpes vaccine is one of the holy grails of infectious disease research,” said William Jacobs Jr., Ph.D., HHMI investigator at Einstein and co-senior author on the study. “We decided to take an approach that runs counter to most of the tactics used by other scientists—and we seem to have cracked the code.” Traditional approaches to HSV-2 vaccine design went with the assumption that the vaccine must stimulate the body to produce neutralizing antibodies, especially against the viral surface protein called glycoprotein D (gD-2),...