Construction and Evaluation of Novel Rhesus Monkey Adenovirus Vaccine Vectors

Adenovirus vectors are widely used as vaccine candidates for a variety of pathogens, including HIV-1. To date, human and chim-panzee adenoviruses have been explored in detail as vaccine vectors. The phylogeny of human and chimpanzee adenoviruses is overlapping, and preexisting humoral and cellular immunity to both are exhibited in human populations worldwide. More dis-tantly related adenoviruses may therefore offer advantages as vaccine vectors. Here we describe the primary isolation and vector-ization of three novel adenoviruses from rhesus monkeys. The seroprevalence of these novel rhesus monkey adenovirus vectors was extremely low in sub-Saharan Africa human populations, and these vectors proved to have immunogenicity comparable to that of human and chimpanzee adenovirus vaccine vectors in mice. These rhesus monkey adenoviruses phylogenetically clus-tered with the poorly described adenovirus species G and robustly stimulated innate immune responses. These novel adenovi-ruses represent a new class of candidate vaccine vectors. IMPORTANCE Although there have been substantial efforts in the development of vaccine vectors from human and chimpanzee adenoviruses, far less is known about rhesus monkey adenoviruses. In this report, we describe the isolation and vectorization of three novel rhesus monkey adenoviruses. These vectors exhibit virologic and immunologic characteristics that make them attractive as po-tential candidate vaccine vectors for both HIV-1 and other pathogens