VOLUME 13 NUMBER 2 (July to December 2020)

by Cecilia P. Mikita¹ and Eduardo A. Padlan*²

¹Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Department of Medicine,
      Allergy/Immunology/Immunizations Service
      4954 North Palmer Road, Bethesda, MD 20889-5600, USA
²4006 Simms Drive, Kensington, MD 20895-1336, USA

Dengue virus infection is a mosquito-borne illness worldwide, affecting up to 390 million people annually. Endemic in more than 120 countries, nearly four billion people are at risk of infection. Most clinical cases self-resolve but approximately 5% experience severe dengue. Antibody-dependent enhancement has been hypothesized as a mechanism to explain severe dengue upon secondary infection. Many investigators are working on dengue vaccines with one currently licensed vaccine on the market and several candidate vaccines are in clinical trials. In an earlier study, we analyzed the structures and sequences of the viral envelope glycoprotein of the dengue serotypes and have located a putative epitope that is shared by the various serotypes. Judicious amino acid replacements to enhance the antigenicity of this epitope relative to the rest of the molecule could produce a possible universal subunit vaccine against dengue without antibody-dependent enhancement. Here, we present our design of such a vaccine.