Immunogenicity of replication-deficient vesicular stomatitis virus based rabies vaccine in mice

Rabies is a viral disease that causes severe neurological manifestations both in humans and various mammals. Although inactivated and/or attenuated vaccines have been developed and widely used around the world, there are still concerns with regard to their safety, efficacy, and costs.

As demand has grown for a new rabies vaccine, we have developed a new vesicular stomatitis viruses (VSVs) based rabies vaccine that replaces glycoproteins with rabies virus (RABV) glycoprotein (GP), or so-called VSV/RABV-GP.

VSV/RABV-GP production was measured by sandwich ELISA. The generation of VSV/RABV-GP was evaluated with GP-specific antibodies and reduced transduction with GP-specific neutralizing antibodies. Virus entry was quantified by measuring the luciferase levels at 18-h post-transduction. BALB/c mice (three groups of six mice each) were intraperitoneally immunized with PBS, RABA, or VSV/RABV-GP at 0 and 14 days. At 28 days post-immunization serology was performed. Statistical significance was calculated using the Holm-Sidak multiple Student's t test.

Mice immunized with VSV/RABV-GP produced IgM and IgG antibodies, whereas IgM titers were significantly higher in mice immunized with VSV/RABV-GP compared to inactivated RABV. The secretion profiles of IgG1 and IgG2a production suggested that VSV/RAVB-GP induces the T helper cell type-2 immune bias. In addition, the average (±SD; n = 3) serum neutralization titers of the inactivated RABV and VSV/RABV-GP groups were 241 ± 40 and 103 ± 54 IU/mL, respectively.

Our results confirm that VSV/RABV-GP could be a new potential vaccination platform for RABV.