Innovations in virus-like particle vaccine production with the baculovirus expression system

Summary

Virus-like particles are a safe and efficacious type of vaccine. These vaccines can be made with the baculovirus expression vector system, a production method that makes use of insect cell culture. Currently, the bottleneck in this production method lies in the complex downstream processing caused by the co-production of large amount of baculovirus particles, that are considered vaccine contaminants. This thesis describes novel and improved methods for producing virus-like particle vaccines in insect cells. First, a SARS-CoV-2 nanoparticle vaccine was constructed and its efficacy was assessed in mice. Second, it was demonstrated that using a temperature-sensitive baculovirus can result in the production of high quality virus-like particle vaccines with reduced baculovirus contamination.