Balancing the influenza neuraminidase and hemagglutinin responses by exchanging the vaccine virus backbone

• DOI: 10.1371/journal.ppat.1009171
• Publication Date: 2021-04-19T20:13:15Z
• Authors: Jin Gao; Hongquan Wan; Xing Li; Mira Rakic Martinez; Laura Klenow; Yamei Gao; Zhiping Ye; Robert Daniels
• Keywords: Antigenic shift

Virions are a common antigen source for many viral vaccines. One limitation to using virions is that the abundance determined by content of each protein in virus. This caveat especially applies viral-based influenza vaccines where low neuraminidase (NA) surface remains bottleneck improving NA antibody response. Our systematic analysis recent H1N1 vaccine antigens demonstrates hemagglutinin (HA) ratio can be improved exchanging backbone internal genes, segment encoding polymerase PB1 subunit. The purified inactivated with higher show more spherical morphology, shift balance between HA receptor binding and release functions, induce better inhibitory response mice. These results indicate viruses support range ratios given pair which used produce elicit balanced neutralizing responses HA.