Lessons from hepatitis E vaccine design

Abstract

Acute hepatitis E is still a major public health issue, especially in developing countries, and hepatitis E virus (HEV) infection will likely only be preventable through prophylactic vaccines. In this review, we describe the lessons learnt from developing the first commercial hepatitis E vaccine (Hecolin), launched to market in China in 2012. The antigenicity and immunogenicity of VLP immunogens concomitant with the scalable Escherichia coli system and our large-scale clinical verification resulted in the success of our vaccine. The structures of the HEV capsid protein in complex with different antibodies provide important molecular insights into capsid assembly and antibody neutralization of the virus, providing a paradigm for B-cell epitope-based vaccine design.