Circular RNA vaccines against monkeypox virus provide potent protection against vaccinia virus infection in mice
Jinge Zhou, Tianxi Ye, Yun Yang, Entao Li, Kaiyue Zhang, Yuping Wang, Shaohong Chen, Jiang Hu, Kai Zhang, Fang Liu, Rui Gong, Xia Chuai, Zefeng Wang, Sandra Chiu
Abstract
Since the outbreak of monkeypox (mpox) in 2022, widespread concern has been placed on imposing an urgent demand for specific vaccines that offer safer and more effective protection. Using an efficient and scalable circular RNA (circRNA) platform, we constructed four circRNA vaccines that could induce robust neutralizing antibodies as well as T cell responses by expressing different surface proteins of mpox virus (MPXV), resulting in potent protection against vaccinia virus (VACV) in mice. Strikingly, the combination of the four circular RNA vaccines demonstrated the best protection against VACV challenge among all the tested vaccines. Our study provides a favorable approach for developing MPXV-specific vaccines by using a circular mRNA platform and opens up novel avenues for future vaccine research.