Prophylactic EBV Vaccines and its Development

Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) is an important global human pathogen found in over 90% of the world’s population. EBV infection usually occurs in young children and causes no or only nonspecific symptoms. However, EBV is the major cause of infectious mononucleosis. EBV is an oncogenic virus associated with various human malignancies of both epithelial and lymphoid origin such as nasopharyngeal carcinoma, a subset of gastric carcinoma (GC), Burkitt’s lymphoma (BL), Hodgkin lymphoma and post-transplant lymphoproliferative disorder (PTLD).

Almost 200,000 cases of EBV-associated malignancies occur each year worldwide. Currently, no vaccine has been licensed to prevent EBV infection or EBV-associated diseases. There is an urgent need for the development of EBV vaccines. Although a vaccine to prevent EBV infection was proposed as long ago as 1973, the development of an EBV vaccine has been agonizingly slow.EBV major envelope glycoprotein gp350 has been widely considered as an attractive candidate for a prophylactic EBV vaccine.

The reason for choosing gp350 is that EBV causes infection predominantly by binding gp350 to the CD21 receptor on the surface of B lymphocytes. Numerous studies have demonstrated the efficacy of gp350-based vaccines. Prophylactic EBV vaccines have been evaluated in controlled clinical trials vaccinated adults, children and infants in China with a single dose of vaccinia virus expressing gp350. 

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