Unmet Need: Currently, only a small percentage of people infected with Hepatitis C Virus (HCV) are treated with direct-acting antiviral (DAA) therapy worldwide. Whilst effective and safe, DAA remains unavailable to many, especially in resource limited settings, and curative treatment does not prevent continued disease progression or reinfection. To eliminate and eradicate disease and prevent complications associated with chronic disease, an HCV preventative vaccine is strongly needed and has been listed as a priority in the US strategy for viral hepatitis elimination.
Technology Overview: Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have developed compositions and methods to define antigenic stimuli with the potential to drive the development of anti-HCV broadly-neutralizing antibodies (bNAbs) in humans. This 'antigenic profiling' method first measures binding of a diverse panel of monoclonal antibodies to HCV envelope (E1E2) proteins. Then, it clusters these proteins based on the similarity of their antibody binding patterns, referred to as the antigenic profile. This method was used to define a specific antigenic profile that is associated with the induction of bNAbs in humans, against which candidate HCV vaccine antigens can be evaluated for their ability to induce bNAbs following inoculation.
Stage of Development: Applying this method to samples collected from a longitudinal cohort of HCV patients, researchers have identified a set of E1E2 proteins that robustly induce bNAbs and could be used as potential HCV vaccine antigens.
Publication: Frumento N, Figueroa A, Wang T, Zahid MN, Wang S, Massaccesi G, Stavrakis G, Crowe JE Jr, Flyak AI, Ji H, Ray SC, Shaw G, Cox AL, Bailey JR. Repeated exposure to heterologous hepatitis C viruses associates with enhanced neutralizing antibody breadth and potency. J Clin Invest. 2022 May 19:e160058. doi: 10.1172/JCI160058. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 35588376.
