Development of Live-Attenuated Arenavirus Vaccines Based on Codon

Arenaviruses have a significant impact on public health and pose a credible biodefense threat, but the development of safe and effective arenavirus vaccines has remained elusive, and currently, no Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-licensed arenavirus vaccines are available. Here, we explored the use of a codon deoptimization (CD)-based approach as a novel strategy to develop live-attenuated arenavirus vaccines. We recoded the nucleoprotein (NP) of the prototypic arenavirus lymphocytic choriomenin-gitis virus (LCMV) with the least frequently used codons in mammalian cells, which caused lower LCMVNP expression levels in transfected cells that correlated with decreased NP activity in cell-based functional assays. We used reverse-genetics approaches to rescue a battery of recombinant LCMVs (rLCMVs) encoding CDNPs (rLCMV/NPCD) that showed attenuated growth kinetics in vitro. Moreover, experiments using the well-characterized mouse model of LCMV infection revealed that rLCMV/NPCD1 and rLCMV/NPCD2 were highly attenuated in vivo but, upon a single immunization, conferred complete protection against a subse-quent lethal challenge with wild-type (WT) recombinant LCMV (rLCMV/WT). Both rLCMV/NPCD1 and rLCMV/NPCD2 were genetically and phenotypically stable during serial passages in FDA vaccine-approved Vero cells. These results provide proof of concept of the safety, efficacy, and stability of a CD-based approach for developing live-attenuated vaccine candidates against human-pathogenic arenaviruses. IMPORTANC