Candidate SARS vaccine fails

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August 3, 2004

New York, NY, Aug. 3 (UPI) -- U.S. and Chinese scientists have discovered that a proposed SARS vaccine triggers an autoimmune response causing the body to attack itself.

Using new tools called glycan microarrays -- which can examine cell chemistry at extremely small scales -- scientists at Columbia University in New York and Sun Yat-sen University in China studied a vaccine made from an inactivated SARS-coronavirus.

They found the antibodies the body created to fight the intentionally weak infection also attacked a particular glycoprotein, a molecule of linked protein and sugar, that is very common in the human system.

"These observations raise concerns on human use of the whole virus-based SARS vaccine that is produced by the monkey Vero E6 cell," the scientists said. The cell line used was produced by monkey Vero E6 cells.

Based on the results, the scientists said it is too risky at the moment to introduce a whole-viral SARS vaccine to human subjects, but choosing an alternative cell line or genetically modifying the Vero E6 cell line might fix the problem.

NVIC Note: The research report appeared in the July 2004 issue of Physiological Genomics, one of 14 journals published by APS.

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