Table 2.
Approaches to viral attenuation for vaccine design
| Vaccine Approach |
Advantages | Disadvantages | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| Empirically attenuated virus |
Excellent immunogenicity, few doses required |
Limited applicability, reversion to wild type, breakthrough disease |
Measles, mumps, rubella (MMR); Oral polioirus vaccine (OPV), Influenza, Rotavirus, Yellow Fever, Varicella |
| Subunit Vaccine | Widely applicable, very safe |
Poor immunogenicity, multiple doses usually required |
Hepatitis B virus, Human papilloma virus |
| Viral vectors | Good immunogenicity, delivery of multiple antigens |
Neutralizing antibodies to vector, possible safety issues |
Many examples (experimental) |
| Defective Viruses |
Good immunogenicity, known mechanism of attenuation |
Limited to inoculation site, possible safety issues |
HSV-1, HSV-2. Influenza (experimental) |
| Replication Fidelity |
Strong immunogenicity, known mechanism of attenuation, not susceptible to antigenic shift/drift |
RNA viruses only, possible reversion to wild type |
Poliovirus (experimental) |
| Codon deoptimization |
Strong immunogenicity, no reversion to wild type, possibly applicable to many viruses |
Possible safety concerns | Poliovirus (experimental) |
| miRNA- controlled virus |
Strong immunogenicity, known mechanism of attenuation, prevent latent infection |
Limited to some RNA viruses |
Poliovirus, adenovirus, coxsackievirus, influenza (experimental) |
| ZFN-controlled virus |
Strong immunogenicity, known mechanism of attenuation, prevent latent infection |
Limited to non-integrating DNA viruses |