Harvard Magazine: Toward a Zika Vaccine
At the one-year mark, the DNA vaccine was no longer effective, reports professor of medicine Dan Barouch, director of Harvard Medical School’s Center for Virology and Vaccine Research (CVVR) at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center today in Science Translational Medicine (STM). The team, including CVVR’s Peter Abbink, Rafael Larocca, and other colleagues there and at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and at Bioqual, an animal-testing facility, did find that the vaccine based on an inactivated Zika virus (administered in two doses, four weeks apart) provided robust protection to 75 percent of rhesus monkeys after one year, a good result. But the third vaccine they had created—delivered by an adenovirus, the family that causes severe colds—proved even more effective, providing 100 percent protection to the monkeys with just a single immunization, even a year after administration.
