The phylogeny of yellow fever virus 17D vaccines

Abstract

In recent years the safety of the yellow fever live vaccine 17D came under scrutiny. The focus was on serious adverse events after vaccinations that resemble a wild type infection with yellow fever and whose reasons are still not known. Also the exact mechanism of attenuation of the vaccine remains unknown to this day. In this context, the standards of safety and surveillance in vaccine production and administration have been discussed. Therein embodied was the demand for improved documentation of the derivation of the seed virus used for yellow fever vaccine production. So far, there was just a historical genealogy available that is based on source area and passage level. However, there is a need for a documentation based on molecular information to get better insights into the mechanisms of pathology. In this work we sequenced the whole genome of different passages of the YFV-17D strain used by Crucell Switzerland AG for vaccine production. Using all other publically available 17D full genome sequences we compared the sequence variance of all vaccine strains and oppose a phylogenetic tree based on full genome sequences to the historical genealogy.