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Sabin

A genetically stable attenuated poliovirus vaccine

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Eradication of poliomyelitis appears to be on track: types 2 and 3 polioviruses have been declared eradicated, and in the past 12 months there have been just 338 cases of type 1 polio in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But there have also been 491 cases of polio caused by the type 2 Sabin vaccine. The development of a modified version of the type 2 vaccine component could improve this situation.

The oral poliovirus vaccines (OPV) developed by Albert Sabin have played a huge role in reducing cases of polio globally from 400,000 a year in 1980 to the current numbers. Their success, however, comes with a cost: they may in rare cases cause the disease they are designed to prevent. The three serotypes of OPV are taken orally and then reproduce in the intestines where they confer effective immunity to polio. During reproduction of the viruses in the intestine, the mutations originally selected by Sabin to eliminate the neurovirulence of the viruses are lost. Most immunized children shed vaccine revertants, and about 1 in 1.4 million vaccine recipients contract polio.

These vaccine revertants also circulate extensively throughout the human population, and may cause outbreaks of polio in areas where vaccine coverage drops. To address this problem, in 2016 WHO removed the type 2 component of poliovirus from OPV, which is responsible for most of the vaccine-associated cases. However vaccine-derived type 2 polioviruses continue to circulate even after this vaccine withdrawal and have caused a number of outbreaks. The response to control these outbreaks is to conduct mass immunizations with OPV type 2 – which re-introduces vaccine-derived polioviruses into the environment.

The solution might be to develop a more genetically stable strain of type 2 OPV. Such strains have been developed by leveraging advances in basic research on polioviruses that have been carried out since the 1980s. A new OPV2 strain (nOPV2) was developed by introducing three different types of changes in the OPV2 genome. First, mutations were introduced in the 5’-noncoding region of the viral RNA in the area of a single base that is a major attenuating mutation in OPV. These changes were designed to stabilize this region against reversion. Second, an RNA stem loop structure called the cre element, which is essential for viral RNA synthesis, was relocated from its original position in the genome to the 5’-noncoding region. This alteration should prevent RNA recombination that would replace the viral 5’-end with that of other enteroviruses, thereby removing the stabilizing changes. Finally, the RNA polymerase was modified so that it made fewer copying errors and had reduced recombination frequency.

The resulting nOPV2 was tested extensively in cells in culture and in experimental animals to demonstrate that the virus did not revert within the 5’-noncoding region, did not recombine with other enteroviruses, and maintained an attenuation phenotype in animals.

Based on these findings nOPV2 and another redesigned strain produced by codon-deoptimization were tested in a phase I trial. The adult volunteers, previously immunized with poliovirus vaccine, were housed in a containment facility to prevent environmental release of nOPV2. After oral administration of either vaccine, adults were monitored for symptoms, induction of immunity, and reversion of the virus to neurovirulence. The results indicated that the nOPV2s are safe, immunogenic, and do not revert to neurovirulence, while maintaining a stable 5’-noncoding region.

Pending ongoing phase 2 trials, nOPV2 is likely to be licensed for use in quelling outbreaks of type 2 vaccine-derived polio. It cannot be tested for efficacy because there are insufficient cases of polio anywhere to allow such a study. It is hoped that the excreted vaccines will not revert to neurovirulence and will circulate for a limited time in humans, as suggested by the preclinical data, thereby eliminating type 2 vaccine-induced polio. However, the numbers of subjects in the clinical trial have been small, and the selection pressure imposed by thousands of human guts might change this outcome. Viruses have been known before to defy our expectations.

Papua New Guinea is no longer polio-free

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Child in Papua New Guinea receiving OPV. Credit: WHO

Last week we discussed the case of polio in Venezuela that turned out not to be polio. Unfortunately the same cannot be concluded about a bona fide case of polio in Papua New Guinea.

Surveillance for acute flaccid paralysis (AFP) revealed a 6 year old boy in Papua New Guinea with lower limb weakness on 28 April 2018. As we discussed previously, AFP surveillance is a sensitive tool that is used to detect cases of polio, but it is not always caused by the virus.

[Read more…] about Papua New Guinea is no longer polio-free

Three countries endemic for poliovirus

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poliovirusI cannot let September pass without noting that 34 years ago this month, I arrived at Columbia University to start my laboratory to do research on poliovirus (pictured). That virus is no longer the sole object of our attention – we are wrapping up some work on poliovirus and our attention has shifted elsewhere. But this is a good month to think about the status of the poliovirus eradication effort.

So far this year 26 cases of poliomyelitis have been recorded – 23 caused by wild type virus, and three caused by vaccine-derived virus. At the same time in 2015 there were 44 reported cases of polio – small progress, but, in the words of Bill Gates, the last one percent is the hardest.

One of the disappointments this year is Nigeria. It was on the verge of being polio-free for one year – the last case of type 1 poliovirus in Nigeria had been recorded in July of 2014. In August the government reported that 2 children developed polio in the Borno State. The genome sequence of the virus revealed that it had been circulating undetected in this region since 2011. Due to threats from militant extremists, it has not been possible for vaccination teams to properly cover this area, and surveillance for polioviruses has also been inefficient. The virus can circulate freely in a poorly immunized population, and as only 1% of infections lead to paralysis, cases of polio might have been missed.

The conclusion from this incident is that the declaration that poliovirus is no longer present in any region is only as good as the surveillance for the virus, which can never be perfect as all sources of infection cannot be covered.

Of the 26 cases of polio recorded so far in 2016, most have been in Afghanistan and Pakistan (9 and 14, respectively). It is quite clear that conflict has prevented vaccination teams from immunizing the population: in Pakistan, militants have attacked polio teams during vaccination campaigns.

Recently 5 of 27 sewage samples taken from different parts of the province of Balochistan in Pakistan have tested positive for poliovirus. Nucleotide sequence analysis revealed that the viruses originated in Afghanistan. The fact that such viruses are present in sewage means that there are still individuals without intestinal immunity to poliovirus in these regions. In response to this finding, a massive polio immunization campaign was planned for the end of September in Pakistan. This effort would involve 6000 teams to reach 2.4 million children. Apparently police will be deployed to protect immunization teams (source: ProMedMail).

The success of the polio eradication program so far has made it clear that if vaccines can be deployed, circulation of the virus can be curtailed. If immunization could proceed unfettered, I suspect the virus would be gone in five years. But can anyone predict whether it will be possible to curtail the violence in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Nigeria that has limited polio vaccination efforts?

From trivalent to bivalent oral poliovirus vaccine

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Antibodies bound to poliovirusFor the first time since April of 1955, recipients of poliovirus vaccine will no longer receive all three serotypes. This past Sunday the World Health Organization orchestrated a synchronized switch from trivalent to bivalent oral poliovirus vaccine (OPV) in 150 countries.

The reason for the switch is clear: type 2 poliovirus was declared eradicated last year, and the only remaining cases are cause by vaccine-derived type 2 polioviruses. After oral administration of poliovirus vaccine, the virus replicates in the intestine, conferring immunity to subsequent infection. In all recipients of the vaccine the viruses lose the mutations that make them safe for humans. Consequently a small number of recipients, and their contacts, contract poliomyelitis from the vaccine.

To prevent further cases of poliomyelitis caused by circulating vaccine-derived polioviruses, WHO planned a synchronized, global switch from trivalent OPV to bivalent OPV on 17 April 2016. By July of 2016 all remaining stocks of the Sabin type 2 poliovirus strains, which are used to produce OPV, will also be destroyed.

My concern with this strategy is that type 2 vaccine-derived polioviruses continue to circulate. Whether they will continue to do so long enough to cause an outbreak of paralytic disease in the cohort of new infants that do not receive type 2 vaccine is a mattern of conjecture. In case there is an outbreak, monovalent type 2 oral poliovirus vaccine is being stockpiled by WHO. Of course, re-introduction of this vaccine will be accompanied by more circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus in the environment, and vaccine-associated disease, the very event WHO is trying to end with the trivalent to bivalent switch.

Type 3 poliovirus has not been isolated since 2012. Only type 1 poliovirus still causes outbreaks in two countries: Pakistan and Afghanistan. The inability to vaccinate in those countries, due to conflict, is delaying eradication. The recent killing of seven police officers who were protecting polio vaccinators by the Pakistani Taliban is an example of this difficulty.

Developing a great vaccine is not the only requirement for preventing infectious disease: you also have to be able to deploy it.

Image: Antibodies bound to poliovirus by Jason Roberts.

Why do we still use Sabin poliovirus vaccine?

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VAPPThe Sabin infectious, attenuated poliovirus vaccines are known to cause vaccine-associated paralysis in a small number of recipients. In contrast, the Salk inactivated vaccine does not cause poliomyelitis. Why are the Sabin vaccines still used globally? The answer to this question requires a brief visit to the history of poliovirus vaccines.

The inactivated poliovirus vaccine (IPV) developed by Jonas Salk was licensed for use in 1955. This vaccine consists of the three serotypes of poliovirus whose infectivity, but not immunogenicity, is destroyed by treatment with formalin. When prepared properly, IPV does not cause poliomyelitis (early batches of IPV were not sufficiently inactivated, leading to vaccine-associated outbreaks of polio, the so-called Cutter incident). From 1955 to 1960 cases of paralytic poliomyelitis in the United States dropped from 20,000 per year to 2,500.

While Salk’s vaccine was under development, several investigators pursued the production of infectious, attenuated vaccines as an alternative. This approach was shown to be effective by Max Theiler, who in 1937 had made an attenuated vaccine against yellow fever virus by passage of the virulent virus in laboratory mice. After many passages, the virus no longer caused disease in humans, but replicated sufficiently to induce protective immunity. Albert Sabin capitalized on these observations and developed attenuated versions of the three serotypes of poliovirus by passage of virulent viruses in different animals and cells. In contrast to Theiler’s yellow fever vaccine, which was injected, Sabin’s poliovirus vaccines were designed to be taken orally – hence the name oral poliovirus vaccine (OPV). As in a natural poliovirus infection, Sabin’s vaccines would replicate in the intestinal tract and induce protective immunity there and in the bloodstream.

Sabin began testing his attenuated vaccines in humans in 1954. By 1957 there was evidence that the virus that was fed to volunteers was not the same as the virus excreted in the feces. As Sabin writes:

It was evident, however, that as in the young adult volunteers, the virus in some of the stool specimens had a greater neurovirulence than the virus originally swallowed in tests in monkeys.

What Sabin did not know was whether the change in neurovirulence of his vaccine strains constituted a threat to the vaccine recipients and their contacts, a question that could only be answered by carrying out larger clinical trials. Many felt that such studies were not warranted, especially considering the success of IPV in reducing the number of paralytic cases. Sabin notes that his friend Tom Rivers, often called the father of American virology, told him to ‘discard the large lots of OPV that I had prepared into a suitable sewer’.

Despite the opposition to further testing of OPV in the US, others had different views. An international committee of the World Health Organization recommended in 1957 that larger trials of OPV should be carried out in different countries. Sabin’s type 2 vaccine was given to 200,000 children during an outbreak of polio in Singapore in 1958, and follow-up studies revealed no safety problems. In Czechoslovakia 140,000 children were given OPV and subsequent studies revealed that the virus spread to unimminized contacts but did not cause disease.

Perhaps the most important numbers came from trials of OPV in the Soviet Union. Sabin had been born in Russia and had close contacts with Soviet virologists, including Mikhail Chumakov, director of the Poliomyelitis Research Institute in Moscow. Chumakov was not satisfied with the results of IPV trials in his country and asked Sabin to send him OPV for testing. By the end of 1959 nearly 15,000,000 people had been given OPV in different parts of the Soviet Union with no apparent side effects. Dorothy Horstmann, a well known virologist at Yale University, was sent to the Soviet Union to evaluate the outcome of the trials. Horstmann writes:

It was clear that the trials had been carefully carried out, and the results were monitored meticulously in the laboratory and in the field. By mid-1960 approximately 100 million persons in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany had received the Sabin strains. Of great importance was the demonstration that the vaccine was safe, not only for the recipients, but for the large numbers of unvaccinated susceptible who must have been exposed as contacts of vaccines.

The results obtained from these trials in the Soviet Union convinced officials in the US and other countries to carry out clinical trials of OPV. In Japan, Israel, Chile, and other countries, OPV was shown to be highly effective in terminating epidemics of poliomyelitis. In light of these findings, all three of Sabin’s OPV strains were approved for use in the US, and in 1961-62 they replaced IPV for routine immunization against poliomyelitis.

As soon as OPV was used in mass immunizations in the US, cases of vaccine-associated paralysis were described. Initially Sabin decried these findings, arguing that temporal association of paralysis with vaccine administration was not sufficient to implicate OPV. He suggested that the observed paralysis was caused by wild-type viruses, not his vaccine strains.

A breakthrough in our understanding of vaccine-associated paralysis came in the early 1980s when the recently developed DNA sequencing methods were used to determine the nucleotide sequences of the genomes of the Sabin type 3 vaccine, the neurovirulent virus from which it was derived, and a virus isolated from a child who had developed paralysis after administration of OPV. The results enumerated for the first time the mutations that distinguish the Sabin vaccine from its neurovirulent parent. More importantly, the genome sequence of the vaccine-associated isolate proved that it was derived from the Sabin vaccine and was not a wild-type poliovirus.

We now understand that every recipient of OPV excretes, within a few days, viruses that are more neurovirulent that the vaccine strains. This evolution occurs because during replication of the OPV strains in the human intestine, the viral genome undergoes mutation and recombination that eliminate the attenuating mutations that Sabin so carefully selected by passage in different hosts.

From 1961 to 1989 there were an average of 9 cases (range, 1-25 cases) of vaccine-associated paralytic poliomyelitis (VAPP) in the United States, in vaccine recipients or their contacts, or 1 VAPP case per 2.9 million doses of OPV distributed (illustrated). Given this serious side effect, the use of OPV was evaluated several times by the Institute of Medicine, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Each time it was decided that the risks associated with the use of OPV justified the cases of VAPP. It was believed that a switch to IPV would lead to outbreaks of poliomyelitis, because: OPV was better than IPV at protecting non-immunized recipients; the need to inject IPV would lead to reduced compliance; and IPV was known to induce less protective mucosal immunity than OPV.

After the WHO began its poliovirus eradication initiative in 1988, the risk of poliovirus importation into the US slowly decreased until it became very difficult to justify routine use of OPV. In 1996 the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices decided that the US would transition to IPV and by 2000 IPV had replaced OPV for the routine prevention of poliomyelitis. As a consequence VAPP has been eliminated from the US.

OPV continues to be used in mass immunization campaigns for the WHO poliovirus eradication program, because it is effective at eliminating wild polioviruses, and is easy to administer. A consequence is that neurovirulent vaccine-derived polioviruses (VDPV) are excreted by immunized children. These VDPVs have caused outbreaks of poliomyelitis in areas where immunization coverage has dropped. Because VDPVs constitute a threat to the eradication campaign, WHO has recommended a global transition to IPV. Once OPV use is eliminated, careful environmental surveillance must be continued to ensure that VDPVs are no longer present before immunization ceases, a goal after eradication of poliomyelitis.

As a virologist working on poliovirus neurovirulence, I have followed the vaccine story since I joined the field in 1979. I have never understood why no cases of VAPP were observed in the huge OPV trials carried out in the Soviet Union. Had VAPP been identified in these trials, OPV might not have been licensed in the US. Global use of OPV has led to near global elimination of paralytic poliomyelitis. Would the exclusive use of IPV have brought us to the same point, without the unfortunate cases of vaccine-associated paralysis? I’m not sure we will ever know the answer.

Update: As recently as 1997 DA Henderson, architect of smallpox eradication, argued that developed countries should not use IPV, because it ‘implies accepting the potential of substantial penalties while reducing but not eliminating, an already extremely small risk of vaccine-associated paralytic illness’.