Polyvalent immunization elicits a synergistic broadly neutralizing immune response to hypervariable region 1 variants of hepatitis C virus

Significance Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infects 58 million people worldwide, with an estimated 1.5 million new infections annually. Despite remarkable advances in treatment, new infections outpace cures, and a prophylactic vaccine is needed to achieve HCV elimination. Vaccine development has been impeded, however, by the extreme genetic variability of HCV. Our previous work indicates that even in highly variable epitopes, HCV is limited by phenotypic constraints that can be exploited by rational vaccine design. Here, we applied a unique measure of genetic distance to model these constraints into a network describing the global HCV sequence space. By combining variants from across this space to immunize mice, we elicited broadly neutralizing antibodies with greater neutralization breadth and potency than a classical vaccine candidate.

• Publication year

  2023

• Venue

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

• Publication date

  2023-06-05

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1073/pnas.2220294120PMID 37276424PMCID 10268328
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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