Fast and long-lasting immune response to S-trimer COVID-19 vaccine adjuvanted by PIKA

Yuan Liu; Lianpan Dai; Xiaoli Feng; Ran Gao; Nan Zhang; Bin Wang; Jianbao Han; Qingcui Zou; Xiling Guo; Hua Zhu; Jiangning Liu; Chuan Qin; Yi Zhang; Linlin Bao; Minghua Li

doi:10.1186/s43556-021-00054-z

Fast and long-lasting immune response to S-trimer COVID-19 vaccine adjuvanted by PIKA

Mol Biomed. 2021;2(1):29. doi: 10.1186/s43556-021-00054-z. Epub 2021 Sep 27.

Authors

Yuan Liu^#¹, Lianpan Dai^#², Xiaoli Feng^#³, Ran Gao^#⁴, Nan Zhang¹, Bin Wang¹, Jianbao Han³, Qingcui Zou³, Xiling Guo⁵, Hua Zhu⁴, Jiangning Liu⁴, Chuan Qin⁴, Yi Zhang¹, Linlin Bao⁴, Minghua Li³

Affiliations

¹ YishengBio Co., Ltd, Beijing, China.
² CAS Key Laboratory of Pathogenic Microbiology and Immunology, Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
³ Kunming National High-Level Biosafety Research Center for Non-Human Primates, Center for Biosafety Mega-Science, Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Kunming, China.
⁴ National Animal Models for Human Diseases Resources Center, NHC Key Laboratory of Human Disease Comparative Medicine, Beijing Key Laboratory for Animal Models of Emerging and Remerging Infectious Diseases, Institute of Laboratory Animal Science, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and Comparative Medicine Center, Peking Union Medical College, Beijing, China.
⁵ National Health Commission of the People's Republic of China, Key Laboratory of Enteric Pathogenic Microbiology (Jiangsu Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention), Nanjing, China.

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

In the face of the emerging variants of SARS-CoV-2, there is an urgent need to develop a vaccine that can induce fast, effective, long-lasting and broad protective immunity against SARS-CoV-2. Here, we developed a trimeric SARS-CoV-2 S protein vaccine candidate adjuvanted by PIKA, which can induce robust cellular and humoral immune responses. The results showed a high level of neutralizing antibodies induced by the vaccine was maintained for at least 400 days. In the study of non-human primates, PIKA adjuvanted S-trimer induced high SARS-CoV-2 neutralization titers and protected from virus replication in the lung following SARS-CoV-2 challenge. In addition, the long-term neutralizing antibody response induced by S-trimer vaccine adjuvanted by PIKA could neutralize multiple SARS-CoV-2 variants and there is no obvious different among the SARS- CoV-2 variants of interest or concern, including B.1.351, B.1.1.7, P.1, B.1.617.1 and B.1.617.2 variants. These data support the utility of S-trimer protein adjuvanted by PIKA as a potential vaccine candidate against SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s43556-021-00054-z.

Keywords: COVID-19; PIKA; S-trimer; SARS-CoV-2; Vaccine; Variants.