On June 13, 2014, associated professor Chunsheng Dong from Dr. Sidong Xiong’s group published an article entitled “A vesicular stomatitis virus-based mucosal vaccine promotes dendritic cell maturation and elicits preferable immune response against coxsackievirus B3 induced viral myocarditis” in Vaccine Journal.
VSV reverse genetics system has been widely applied as the vaccine delivery vector for various of pathogens, such as HIV、HBV and HPV. Studies showed that VSV based vaccines are able to induce efficient antibody response as well cellularresponse. However, the capacity of VSV-based vaccines to induce mucosal immunity has not yet been fully characterized. In the present study, a recombinant VSV expressing coxsackievirus B3 (CVB3) major immunogen VP1 has been generated and the immune protection elicited by VSV-VP1 was evaluated. We demonstrated that intranasal delivery of VSV-VP1 can induce a potent antigen-specific mucosal immune response as well as a systemic immune response, particularly the induction of poly functional T cells. Importantly, mice immunized with VSV-VP1 were better protected against CVB3-induced viral myocarditis than those receiving achitosan-formulated DNA vaccine. Increased dendritic cell (DC) maturation inthe mesenteric lymph node (MLN) was observed in the mice vaccinated withVSV-VP1, which could be a potential mechanism for the protective immune response. These findings support VSV as a viral delivery vector that can inducer obust mucosal immunity that should be considered for further vaccine development.
Ms. Fei Wu was the first authors, and Prof.Sidong Xiong and Chunsheng Dong are the co-corresponding authors. This work was supported by grants Major State Basic Research Development Program of China, Ministry of Science and Technology of China (2013CB531502, 2013CB530501), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31270977, 81072413,81101257, 31170878), Qing Lan Project of the Jiangsu higher education institutions, Jiangsu Provincial Innovative Research Team et al..