The safety of Adenovirus type 5 as a vaccine vector is validated at GIBH

Recently, a research team led by visiting investigator Dr. Lin Chen from GIBH published its research result Epidemiology of adenovirus type 5 neutralizing antibodies in healthy people and AIDS patients in Guangzhou, Southern China in Vaccine, a world leading vaccinology journal. In this research, the team investigated the seroprevalence of Ad5 in Guangzhou, Southern China by measuring the Ad5 neutralizing antibodies in blood samples collected from several sites and validated its safety as a vector for vaccine.

Ad5 as a vaccine vector has many benign features. It once was considered as the lead candidate in vaccine research and was extensively put into Phase II clinical trials around the world. At the end of 2007, however, Merck and HVTN terminated the vaccine clinical trials due to its inefficacious prevention of HIV. Afterwards, some scientists believed that one of the reasons that may have caused the failure of the vaccine was due to the seroprevalence of the Ad5 neutralizing antibodies among the population. However, it hasn’t been concluded whether there is any correlation between the seroprevalence of the Ad5 neutralizing antibodies and the HIV susceptibility. The research team conducted an epidemiological survey in Guangzhou and the results show that most of the people are naturally infected with Ad5 and the seroprevalence antibody titers increase with age. Additionally, the seroprevalence of the Ad5 neutralizing antibodies in the HIV-infected AIDS patients had no significant statistical difference from that of the general healthy population. This research suggests that there is no correlation between the seroprevalence of the Ad5 neutralizing antibodies and the HIV susceptibility, which provides useful insights for the future development of Ad5-based vaccination.

This research is sponsored by the "Eleventh Five-Year" major national science and technology project, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Natural Science Foundation of China.