Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Review
. 2022 May 9;21(1):e127042.
doi: 10.5812/ijpr-127042. eCollection 2022 Dec.

A Review of Virus-Like Particle-Based SARS-CoV-2 Vaccines in Clinical Trial Phases

Mohammad Sharifzadeh  1 , Negar Mottaghi-Dastjerdi  2 , Mohammad Soltany Rezae Raad  3
Affiliations
Review

A Review of Virus-Like Particle-Based SARS-CoV-2 Vaccines in Clinical Trial Phases

Mohammad Sharifzadeh et al. Iran J Pharm Res. .

Abstract

The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has affected more than 269 million worldwide, with more than five million deaths as of early December 2021. The main concerns in this pandemic include the asymptomatic nature of COVID-19, leading to the infection of many healthy people, the infectious nature of the pathogen, and its high spreading rate. The disease features have highlighted the importance of controlling this pandemic via vaccines. There has been a worldwide race to produce better, more protective, and efficacious vaccines. Simultaneously, different new variants of the virus are emerging. Therefore, there is a concern about the efficacy of the vaccines against new variants. The platform used for COVID-19 vaccine development needs to be flexible enough to enable the manufacturer to react suitably to new virus variants. We performed a comprehensive search in the online databases of PubMed, Scopus, Google Scholar, clinicaltrials.gov, WHO, ICTRP, and Cochrane until December 10th, 2021. There are 331 candidate vaccines in clinical development, with 194 in the preclinical stage and 137 in different clinical phases. Eleven platforms have been used for the development of COVID-19 vaccines, including inactivated/live attenuated virus, protein subunit, virus-like particle (VLP), non-replicating/replicating viral vectors (VVnr or VVr), VVr or VVnr plus antigen-presenting cell, bacterial antigen-spore expression vector, DNA, and RNA. The VLP-based vaccine platform is a safe, highly immunogenic, and flexible platform for developing vaccines. This review focuses on VLP-based vaccine platforms and explicitly discusses the six VLP-based COVID-19 vaccines in clinical trial phases.

Keywords: 2019-nCoV; COVID-19; Novel Coronavirus; SARS-CoV-2; Vaccines; Virus-Like Particle.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

Conflict of Interests: The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.. Vaccine products in clinical development (as of early December 2021).
Figure 2.
Figure 2.. An overview of different SARS-CoV-2 vaccine platforms.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.. SpyTag/SpyCatcher technology for the development of VLP vaccines.
Figure 4.
Figure 4.. Medicago technology for the development of plant-based VLP vaccines
Figure 5.
Figure 5.. Structure of VLP and eVLP. VBI developed its COVID-19 vaccine based on eVLP technology.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Randolph HE, Barreiro LB. Herd Immunity: Understanding COVID-19. Immunity. 2020;52(5):737–41. doi: 10.1016/j.immuni.2020.04.012. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Fougeroux C, Goksoyr L, Idorn M, Soroka V, Myeni SK, Dagil R, et al. Capsid-like particles decorated with the SARS-CoV-2 receptor-binding domain elicit strong virus neutralization activity. Nat Commun. 2021;12(1):324. doi: 10.1038/s41467-020-20251-8. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Sharma O, Sultan AA, Ding H, Triggle CR. A Review of the Progress and Challenges of Developing a Vaccine for COVID-19. Front Immunol. 2020;11:585354. doi: 10.3389/fimmu.2020.585354. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Tavassoly O, Safavi F, Tavassoly I. Heparin-binding Peptides as Novel Therapies to Stop SARS-CoV-2 Cellular Entry and Infection. Mol Pharmacol. 2020;98(5):612–9. doi: 10.1124/molpharm.120.000098. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Brian DA, Baric RS. Coronavirus genome structure and replication. Curr Top Microbiol Immunol. 2005;287:1–30. doi: 10.1007/3-540-26765-4_1. - DOI - PMC - PubMed

LinkOut - more resources