DNA vaccines for SARS-CoV-2: toward third-generation vaccination era

ABSTRACT

Introduction: Coronavirus outbreak 2019 (COVID-19) has affected all the corners of the globe and created chaos to human life. In order to put some control on the pandemic, vaccines are urgently required that are safe, cost effective, easy to produce, and most importantly induce appropriate immune responses and protection against viral infection. DNA vaccines possess all these features and are promising candidates for providing protection against SARS-CoV-2.

Area covered: Current understanding and advances in DNA vaccines toward COVID-19, especially those under various stages of clinical trials.

Expert opinion: Through DNA vaccines, host cells are momentarily transformed into factories that produce proteins of the SARS-CoV-2. The host immune system detects these proteins to develop antibodies that neutralize and prevent the infection. This vaccine platform has additional benefits compared to traditional vaccination strategies like strong cellular immune response, higher safety margin, a simple production process as per cGMP norms, lack of any infectious agent, and a robust platform for large-scale production.

KEYWORDS:

• SARS-CoV-2
• COVID-19
• vaccine
• immunization
• pandemic
• DNA vaccine
• genetic vaccine
• nucleotide vaccines

Article highlights

• DNA vaccine platform has many benefits over traditional vaccination strategies like a strong cellular immune response along with generation of neutralizing antibodies, higher safety margin, a simple production process as per cGMP norms, lack of any infectious agent, and a robust platform for large-scale production.

• The short amount of time needed from design to clinical trials is a significant benefit of current advances in DNA vaccine development. As a result, this could eventually be able to test alternative antigen variants that cover ubiquitous mutations in the very same vaccination.

• In human clinical trials in healthy individuals, DNA-based COVID-19 vaccines have shown better safety profile, and a strong immune response generation in the investigated time frames.

• This manuscript covers information related to all DNA vaccines for COVID-19 including EUA vaccine from Zydus.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge Dr. Lalit Vora (Queen’s University, Belfast, UK) for peer-reviewing the manuscript and providing valuable input to refine the manuscript. Vasso Apostolopoulos would like to thank the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of Australia, the donors to the Victoria University vaccine appeal, the Pappas Family and the Immunology and Translational Research Group, Victoria University Australia for support and/or valuable insights.

Declaration of interest

The author(s) have no relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript. This includes employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants or patents received or pending, or royalties.

Author contributions

Vivek P Chavda conceptualized the manuscript. Radhika Pandya and Vivek P Chavda wrote the manuscript, Vasso Apostolopoulos revised the manuscript. All authors contributed equally and reviewed the final version of the manuscript. The figures of the manuscript were prepared using BioRender.com; https://app.biorender.com/biorender-templates

Additional information

Funding

This paper was not funded.