What if mosquito saliva holds the key to better fighting Zika, dengue and West Nile viruses?
Mosquitoes do more than simply transmit the viruses they carry: Their saliva may actively help these viruses establish infection in the body from the very moment of the bite. This is the finding of a study conducted by a team from the IRD, CNRS, the University of Montpellier (France) and Mahidol University (Thailand), published in Nature Communications.
A fusion-loop-engineered Zika vaccine has shown promise in nonhuman primates, according to a study published in Cell Reports Medicine. Researchers at the Institute of Microbiology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medical Biology of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences redesigned the viral envelope protein's fusion loop to stimulate protective antibodies while minimizing the risk of antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE).
ADE is a concern in flavivirus vaccine development, as it can worsen infection instead of preventing it. The study's lead authors, Dai Lianpan and George F. Gao, found that over 97% of the vaccine-induced B cells were ZIKV-specific, dominated by a convergent population using a germline ortholog of human IGHV5-10-1. Antibodies from this population blocked multiple stages of viral entry and targeted a distinct, vulnerable hotspot on ZIKV.
Importantly, these antibodies do not cross-react with dengue virus due to the absence of a homologous glycan that imposes steric shielding. These findings support the redesign of Zika vaccines to preserve protection while reducing the risk of dengue antibody-dependent enhancement.
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