The top international journal "Science" published the breakthrough research progress of Professor Zhou Demin/Academician Zhang Lihe, Director of the State Key Laboratory of Natural Medicines and Biomimetic Medicines, Peking University School of Pharmacy. They used influenza virus as a model to invent artificial control of virus replication Thus the technology of directly transforming the virus into a vaccine, the research result is called a "revolutionary" or "disruptive" discovery.
According to Zhou Demin, deadly infectious diseases such as influenza, AIDS, SARS and Ebola hemorrhagic fever and their periodic outbreaks are always endangering human health and social stability. Behind the scenes are viruses with diverse structures, complex functions, and rapid mutations. The vaccine is an effective means to prevent viral infections. Vaccines currently in clinical use may be poor in immunogenicity and safety due to virus inactivation, or due to complex preparation processes that are not universal, or due to virus mutations that cause immune escape failure, which makes people often talk about virus discoloration.
With the support of the National Innovative Drug Project, the National Funding Committee and the National "973" Program, Zhou Demin/Zhang Lihe's research team discovered this artificially controlled virus replication technology to directly transform the virus into a vaccine, that is, while preserving the complete structure and In the case of infectivity, only one triplet code of the virus genome is mutated, which turns the influenza virus from a lethal source of infection into a preventive vaccine, and more than three triplet codes are mutated, and the virus changes from a preventive vaccine to a drug for treating viral infections. And with the increase in the number of triple code, the efficacy of the drug increases. This "four-two-two-stroke" technology not only makes vaccine research and development no longer complicated, but also gets rid of the dependence on the knowledge of virus biology, and is applicable to almost all viruses. This discovery overturned the concept of virus vaccine research and development and achieved a major breakthrough in live virus vaccines.
Zhou Demin introduced that the vaccine they developed is a live virus vaccine, that is, it retains the full infectivity of the wild influenza virus, but removes its ability to replicate and produce new viruses in the cells after it infects the human body. In this way, they retain all the immunogenicity caused by the virus infecting the human body, namely humoral immunity, nasal mucosal immunity, and T-cell immunity, while the toxicity to the human body is controlled. This method is completely different from the currently used inactivated vaccines that are only partially immunized, and is also different from the attenuated vaccines that still retain weak replication ability and are dangerously toxic. This general method can be used for vaccines and therapeutic biotechnology drugs for almost any deadly viruses including AIDS, SARS and Ebola hemorrhagic fever, and can be used to develop preventive biochemical weapons that affect national defense security.