New York: An experimental mRNA vaccine from US drugmaker Moderna has performed well against human cytomegalovirus (CMV) – a common virus that can infect babies during pregnancy.
While the virus rarely causes serious illness in healthy adults, it can cause birth defects and brain damage in newborns infected in utero and fatal infections in immune-compromised adults.
Although healthy adults are largely asymptomatic, one in every 200 newborns worldwide is infected with CMV during the mother’s pregnancy.
“It is the most common congenital infection worldwide,” said Dr. Sally Parmar, chair of the Department of Pediatrics and Nancy C. Paduano, MD, professor of pediatrics at Weill Cornell Medicine.
The study, published in The Journal of Infectious Diseases, provided evidence that the new mRNA vaccine candidate can protect adults from CMV.
Thus, it can potentially prevent women from spreading harmful infections to their babies during pregnancy.
The new mRNA vaccine yielded responses that were better at preventing the CMV virus from infecting the epithelial cells that line the mouth and nose and providing a first line of defense against viral infection, compared with an earlier milder vaccine called GB/MF59. The successful vaccine candidate was tested. Sanofi and Novartis unveiled the study conducted by a team from Weill Cornell Medicine at Cornell University.
The mRNA vaccine was also more effective in triggering the immune system to destroy CMV-infected cells.
“We have learned that the new vaccine has the potential to be more effective than the previous CMV vaccine candidate because some of the functional immune responses it generates are of greater magnitude,” Parmar said.
The team used data and patient samples from the GB/MF59 Phase 2 trial in teenage girls as a benchmark to assess the new mRNA-based vaccine.
Moderna used mRNA technology for the CMV vaccine and added a second target in addition to glycoprotein B used by Sanofi and Novartis – a five-unit protein complex that prevents the virus from infecting the epithelial cells that line the nose and mouth. allows for.
In the study, Parmar and his team compared the immune responses of individuals vaccinated with GB/MF59 in a Phase 2 trial with those immunized with Moderna’s mRNA-based CMV vaccine in a Phase 1 clinical trial that ended in 2020.
Specifically, the team compared immune responses in people who were protected against CMV infection after receiving the older vaccines.
The Moderna vaccine has advanced into the first Phase 3 clinical study for a CMV vaccine candidate, which will help determine whether these differences in immune responses will provide stronger protection against CMV.
“After more than 50 years of research, we are closer than ever to a licensed CMV vaccine,” Parmar said.
“The new mRNA platform has great potential.”
