Beyond vaccine dosage, genetic modifications to the current measles vaccine to overcome maternal passive immunity

Abstract

Pediatric measles infections still cause an unacceptable rate of childhood mortality. Despite the availability of an efficient preventative vaccine, measles virus can spread among the population of even developed countries. The availability of a reverse genetic system for measles, based on recombinant virus recovery from cDNA, allows application of the principles of intelligent vaccine design. Using this system, we recently demonstrated that a version of the current attenuated measles virus strain genetically modified to express higher levels of the viral hemagglutinin protein, the major target of neutralizing antibodies, is more immunogenic and resists passive immunity with a better immunogenicity profile in a mouse model than the current measles vaccine. The significance and practicality of this development are discussed.