Development of chimpanzee adenoviruses as vaccine vectors: challenges and successes emerging from clinical trials

Abstract

Replication-defective chimpanzee adenovirus vectors are emerging as a promising new class of genetic vaccine carriers. Chimpanzee adenovirus vectors have now reached the clinical stage and appear to be endowed with all the properties needed for human vaccine development, including high quality and magnitude of the immune response induced against the encoded antigens, good safety and ease of manufacturing on a large-scale basis. Here the authors review the recent findings of this novel class of adenovirus vectors and compare their properties to other clinical stage vaccine vectors derived from poxvirus, alphavirus and human adenovirus.

Keywords::

• HCV
• HIV/AIDS
• immunity
• malaria
• T cells
• vaccine
• vector
• virus

Financial & competing interests disclosure

S Colloca, A Folgori, R Cortese and A Nicosia are named inventors on patent applications covering HCV vectored vaccines and chimpanzee adenovirus vectors (WO 2006133911 (A3) HCV nucleic acid vaccine, WO 2005071093 (A3) chimpanzee adenovirus vaccine carriers, WO 03031588 (A2) HCV vaccine). The authors are employees and/or shareholders in Okairos, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company developing genetic vaccines for major infectious diseases, including HCV. The authors have no other 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 apart from those disclosed.

No writing assistance was utilized in the production of this manuscript.