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Concern about the ongoing Zika virus (ZIKV) pandemic and about the associated risk for microcephaly for infants born to mothers infected during pregnancy has led to substantial efforts to produce a vaccine. A multinational team of researchers, who previously found evidence that both inactivated and DNA ZIKV vaccines could protect mice, have now extended studies of several candidate vaccines into nonhuman primate studies.
The researchers first immunized eight rhesus monkeys subcutaneously with two doses of a purified inactivated ZIKV vaccine (PIV). Compared with a sham vaccine, the PIV induced both detectable binding of antibodies to the ZIKV envelope and neutralizing antibodies, along with a cellular immune response. In challenge studies wit…