Can you believe it? Mosquitoes can actually help with vaccinations!

In order to enable the body to acquire immunity to certain viruses in advance and thus reduce the harm of viral infection to the human body as much as possible, most people have experienced the "childhood shadow" of vaccination.

Watching the needle being pushed into their skin little by little, not only will children be scared and cry, but some adults may also feel uncomfortable.

"Needle-phobic Alien": Don't come! Don't touch!

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The good news is that vaccines do not necessarily need to be injected into the human body. In addition, there are oral forms. For example, virologist Professor Gu Fangzuo has developed a sugar pill vaccine for us to prevent polio.

With the development of science and technology, the production and application of vaccines are constantly being improved and perfected.

Recently, the team led by Zheng Aihua, a researcher at the Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, proposed another new vaccine injection idea:

Injecting the vaccine into the body through mosquito bites greatly saves manpower and material resources. This method has been successfully tested in model mice.

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01

Mosquito bites: A new way to inject vaccines

In this study, researchers combined Zika virus (ZIKV) and insect-specific flavivirus Chaoyang virus (CYV) to obtain the chimeric virus CYV-ZIKV.

Zika virus infection can cause low fever, maculopapular rash, pain, weakness, etc. In addition, more and more evidence shows that there is a correlation between Zika virus and microcephaly in newborns.

The insect-specific flavivirus Chaoyang virus is a type of insect-borne virus, but it is less pathogenic and can only survive in mosquito cells.

The CYV-ZIKV chimeric virus retains the characteristics of the insect-specific flavivirus Chaoyang virus strain, which only replicates in mosquito cells but does not infect vertebrates, while also having the toxicity of the Zika virus.

Injection experiments showed that injecting the CYV-ZIKV strain into mice can induce strong humoral immunity in mice, thereby making the mice immune to Zika virus.

The saliva of mosquitoes infected with CYV-ZIKV will contain a large amount of viral pathogens. Through biting, mosquitoes can transmit CYV-ZIKV to the bitten organism, making the bitten organism immune to the Zika virus.

After obtaining the CYV-ZIKV chimera strain, the researchers first used mosquitoes infected with CYV-ZIKV to bite experimental mice. In order to verify whether the bitten mice had immunity to Zika virus, the researchers then used three different subtypes of Zika virus strains to attack the mice.

The results showed that mosquitoes infected with CYV-ZIKV could effectively protect mice from Zika virus infection through their biting behavior.

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02

How safe are artificial chimera viruses?

Letting mosquitoes act as "free labor" to "vaccinate" other organisms sounds like a good idea, but how safe is this method?

Is this artificial chimera virus safe? Will it flow into the ecosystem's big cycle? Will it infect humans?

As mentioned earlier, the CYV-ZIKV virus is a hybrid of the Zika virus and the insect-specific flavivirus Chaoyang virus. The Zika virus can only infect and replicate in mosquitoes, but not in vertebrates.

This property is retained in CYV-ZIKV, so that CYV-ZIKV can only flow from mosquitoes to organisms bitten by mosquitoes, and not from the bitten organism to another vertebrate.

At the same time, mosquitoes infected with CYV-ZIKV will lose their ability to reproduce after being irradiated with X-rays, and will no longer spill CYV-ZIKV into the environment, thus ensuring the ecological safety of this chimeric virus.

03

Targeted vaccination:

New ideas for wildlife protection

Arboviruses kill millions of wild animals and cause huge damage to ecosystems.

Targeted vaccination of wild animal hosts to enable them to acquire corresponding immunity is a promising method for protecting wild animals.

With this approach, not only can the problem of zoonotic diseases in livestock and humans be controlled, but endangered wildlife can also be protected.

This achievement utilizes the characteristics of mosquito bites, making them a natural vaccine syringe, providing a new idea for protecting wild animals, especially endangered wild animals, from viral harm and is highly innovative.

In addition, by eliminating viruses from wildlife, the chances of wildlife viruses spreading to humans will also be greatly reduced.

At present, the verification of this result is only on model experimental mice. The subsequent research team will continue to conduct experiments and verification on vaccine injections in wild animals.

Note: The relevant results were published online in the international authoritative journal Nature Communications in the form of a paper titled "Suppression of flavivirus transmission from animal hosts to mosquitoes with a mosquito-delivered vaccine".

Produced by | Science Popularization China

Author: Bingbingbang (Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences)

Producer｜China Science Expo

Submitted by: Computer Network Information Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences

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