PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Flavia Chiuppesi
AU  - Marcela d’Alincourt Salazar
AU  - Heidi Contreras
AU  - Vu H Nguyen
AU  - Joy Martinez
AU  - Soojin Park
AU  - Jenny Nguyen
AU  - Mindy Kha
AU  - Angelina Iniguez
AU  - Qiao Zhou
AU  - Teodora Kaltcheva
AU  - Roman Levytskyy
AU  - Nancy D Ebelt
AU  - Tae Hyuk Kang
AU  - Xiwei Wu
AU  - Thomas Rogers
AU  - Edwin R Manuel
AU  - Yuriy Shostak
AU  - Don J Diamond
AU  - Felix Wussow
TI  - Development of a Synthetic Poxvirus-Based SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine
AID  - 10.1101/2020.07.01.183236
DP  - 2020 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2020.07.01.183236
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/07/02/2020.07.01.183236.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/07/02/2020.07.01.183236.full
AB  - Modified Vaccinia Ankara (MVA) is a highly attenuated poxvirus vector that is widely used to develop vaccines for infectious diseases and cancer. We developed a novel vaccine platform based on a unique three-plasmid system to efficiently generate recombinant MVA vectors from chemically synthesized DNA. In response to the ongoing global pandemic caused by SARS coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), we used this novel vaccine platform to rapidly produce fully synthetic MVA (sMVA) vectors co-expressing SARS-CoV-2 spike and nucleocapsid antigens, two immunodominant antigens implicated in protective immunity. Mice immunized with these sMVA vectors developed robust SARS-CoV-2 antigen-specific humoral and cellular immune responses, including potent neutralizing antibodies. These results demonstrate the potential of a novel vaccine platform based on synthetic DNA to efficiently generate recombinant MVA vectors and to rapidly develop a multi-antigenic poxvirus-based SARS-CoV-2 vaccine candidate.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.