Comparison of immunogenicity and protection efficacy of self-amplifying and circular mRNA vaccines for SARS-CoV-2

Abstract

Recent advances in vaccine technology have positioned messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines as safe and reliable options for human use. Conventionally, mRNA vaccines were designed using linear or self-amplifying mRNA (SAM), the latter considered to be superior. However, limited success was achieved with SAM vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic. Further, studies on Circular mRNA (Circ-RNA) vaccines against the SARS-CoV-2, Ebola and monkey pox proved their efficacy. Circ-RNAs are highly stable, neither they induce inflammatory response nor require any extracellular protein for their function. Here, we compared the efficacy of SAM- and Circ-RNA vaccines using the SARS-CoV-2-RBD (receptor binding domain) as the antigen. Both SAM-RBD and Circ-RBD induced a comparable anti-RBD IgG titer and virus-neutralizing antibody titer. However, the latter induced a significantly higher memory T-cell response. Immunization with SAM- and Circ-RBD showed no mortality and improved lung pathophysiology against acute SARS-CoV-2 infection in mice. The Circ-RBD vaccine is stable for 4 weeks at 40C. A bivalent vaccine containing Circ-RBD of both delta and omicron SARS-CoV-2 variants potently neutralized these viruses. These findings demonstrate Circ-RNA-RBD as an excellent vaccine candidate against COVID-19 and also provide a platform for developing bivalent Circ-RNA vaccine candidates against SARS-CoV-2 or other viruses with rapidly emerging variants.