Production of antiviral vaccines using a silkworm-baculovirus expression system

Abstract

The outbreak of the new coronavirus (SARS-2) infection (COVID-19) in Wuhan, China, has become a global outbreak and continues to cause many deaths. Not only COVID-19, but the risk of pandemic continues to increase due to global environmental changes and globalization of human exchange and logistics. On the other hand, we are inadequately prepared for such unknown emerging infectious diseases, and dealing with viral infections has become one of the most important issues facing humanity. Vaccine based disease prevention is considered an ideal disease control strategy, especially for viral diseases for which there is no or little cure. New nucleic acid vaccines (mRNA and viral vector vaccines) are leading the way in the fight against COVID-19, but even today, the mainstream of vaccines are inactivated vaccines and live-attenuated vaccines. Subunit vaccines, in which some specific viral proteins of the pathogen are produced as recombinant proteins and used as vaccine antigens, have also been developed. On the other hand, many antigens that are difficult to produce in large quantities as recombinant proteins, such as the spike protein antigen of COVID-19 (the same antigen is also targeted by nucleic acid vaccines), have not yet been produced and developed. In this paper, we describe the development of a recombinant protein vaccine based on the silkworm insect factory, which has an advantage in the production of such difficult-to-express vaccine antigens.