Vaccine against norovirus

Abstract

Noroviruses (NoVs) are important pathogens causing epidemic acute gastroenteritis affecting millions of people worldwide. Due to the inability to cultivate NoVs, current NoV vaccine development relies on bioengineering technologies to produce virus-like particles (VLPs) and other subviral particles of NoVs as subunit vaccines. The first VLP vaccine has reached phase II clinical trials and several others are under development in pre-clinical research. Several subviral complexes made from the protruding (P) domains of NoV capsid share common features of easy production, high stability and high immunogenicity and thus are candidates for low cost vaccines. These P domain complexes can also be used as vaccine platforms to present foreign antigens for potential dual vaccines against NoVs and other pathogens. Development of NoV vaccines also faces other challenges, including genetic diversity of NoVs, limit understanding of NoV immunology and evolution, and lack of an efficient NoV animal model for vaccine assessment, which are discussed in this article. © 2014 Landes Bioscience.