{"doi":"10.3390/vaccines9101142","title":"Enemy of My Enemy: A Novel Insect-Specific Flavivirus Offers a Promising Platform for a Zika Virus Vaccine","abstract":"Vaccination remains critical for viral disease outbreak prevention and control, but conventional vaccine development typically involves trade-offs between safety and immunogenicity. We used a recently discovered insect-specific flavivirus as a vector in order to develop an exceptionally safe, flavivirus vaccine candidate with single-dose efficacy. To evaluate the safety and efficacy of this platform, we created a chimeric Zika virus (ZIKV) vaccine candidate, designated Aripo/Zika virus (ARPV/ZIKV). ZIKV has caused immense economic and public health impacts throughout the Americas and remains a significant public health threat. ARPV/ZIKV vaccination showed exceptional safety due to ARPV/ZIKV’s inherent vertebrate host-restriction. ARPV/ZIKV showed no evidence of replication or translation in vitro and showed no hematological, histological or pathogenic effects in vivo. A single-dose immunization with ARPV/ZIKV induced rapid and robust neutralizing antibody and cellular responses, which offered complete protection against ZIKV-induced morbidity, mortality and in utero transmission in immune-competent and -compromised murine models. Splenocytes derived from vaccinated mice demonstrated significant CD4+ and CD8+ responses and significant cytokine production post-antigen exposure. Altogether, our results further support that chimeric insect-specific flaviviruses are a promising strategy to restrict flavivirus emergence via vaccine development.","journal":"Vaccines","year":2021,"id":176751,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":21,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9486,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2021-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":720127,"name":"Sarah N. Wilson","orcid":null,"position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":720128,"name":"Dawn I. Auguste","orcid":null,"position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":503108,"name":"Andrew Leber","orcid":"0000-0001-9765-4702","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":350009,"name":"Sheryl Coutermarsh‐Ott","orcid":"0000-0001-7385-3969","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":297448,"name":"Irving C. Allen","orcid":"0000-0001-9573-5250","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":413846,"name":"Clayton C. Caswell","orcid":"0000-0003-3793-8804","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":413841,"name":"James A. Budnick","orcid":"0000-0001-9867-4895","position":7,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":473469,"name":"Josep Bassaganya-Riera","orcid":"0000-0003-2969-2197","position":8,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":430873,"name":"Raquel Hontecillas","orcid":"0000-0003-2942-6294","position":9,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":126160,"name":"James Weger-Lucarelli","orcid":"0000-0002-9483-1694","position":10,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":105319,"name":"Scott C. Weaver","orcid":"0000-0001-8016-8556","position":11,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":440343,"name":"Albert J. Auguste","orcid":"0000-0001-9048-0041","position":12,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":704689,"name":"Danielle L. Porier","orcid":"0000-0001-8837-9673","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":49,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:47:23.605867Z","pmid":"34696250","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}