DIOS-CoVax - A vaccine designed to protect against COVID-19 and future Coronavirus epidemics, mitigating antibody enhanced disease.

安全高效的疫苗是预防传染病最有希望的医疗干预措施。在撰写本文时，已向世卫组织报告了500多万例病例和33万例死亡。这种冠状病毒被称为SARS-CoV-2，会导致一种名为COVID-19的呼吸道疾病。目前基于刺突的实验性冠状病毒疫苗在接受实验性疫苗测试的动物中疗效有限，而且人们仍然担心长期的免疫病理。接种实验性SARS疫苗的动物在感染冠状病毒时，比未接种疫苗的感染冠状病毒的动物出现了更严重的肺部疾病，这意味着人体试验和疫苗开发是不可能的。我们的研究使用创新技术来避免这些问题，选择修饰的冠状病毒抗原，这些抗原将被纳入疫苗中，并将触发人体免疫系统产生重要和集中的抗体反应，我们需要这些抗体反应来保护我们免受病毒的侵害。这一提议将使这种新疫苗通过生产和安全测试阶段，完成首次人体试验。值得注意的是，DNA疫苗不需要冷链，而且可以不用针头注射，相对无痛，从而允许快速部署高效的大规模疫苗接种策略。

Safe and highly effective vaccines are the most promising medical interventions for the prevention of infectious diseases. At the time of writing, there have been over 5 million cases and 330,000 deaths reported to the WHO. The coronavirus, referred to as SARS-CoV-2, causes a respiratory disease termed COVID-19\.Current experimental Spike-based coronavirus vaccines have limited efficacy in animals tested with the experimental vaccine, and there remains concerns about longer-term immunopathology. Animals given experimental SARS vaccines suffered more serious lung disease when challenged with coronavirus than unvaccinated animals who were infected with coronavirus, meaning human trials and vaccine development were impossible.Our study uses innovative technologies to avoid these problems by selecting modified coronavirus antigens that will be incorporated in the vaccine and will trigger the human immune system to produce the important and focussed antibody responses that we need to protect us against the virus. This proposal will take this new vaccine through the manufacturing and safety testing phases to a completed first in human phase 1 trial. Of note, the DNA vaccine does not require a cold-chain and can be administered without a needle, relatively pain-free, allowing highly efficient mass vaccination strategies to be rapidly deployed.