George Mason University

Brian Hetrick

Yuntao Wu

Deemah Dabbagh

Sijia He

Recombinant viruses include one or more SHREK proteins and are thereby rendered non-infective and can be safely used in vaccines, e.g. to treat or prevent infections and to eliminate e.g. latent virus reservoirs.

Recombinant host cell with heterologous nucleic acids encoding SHREK proteins

Timely development of vaccines and antiviral drugs is critical to control the COVID-19 pandemic. Current methods for quantifying vaccine-induced neutralizing antibodies involve the use of pseudoviruses, such as the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein (S) pseudotyped lentivirus. However, these pseudoviruses contain structural proteins foreign to SARS-CoV-2, and require days to infect and express reporter genes. Here, the present application discloses composition and methodology for making and using a new hybrid alphavirus-SARS-CoV-2 (Ha-CoV-2) particle for rapid and accurate quantification of neutralization antibodies and viral variants.

Growing community of inventors

Manassas, VA, United States of America

Brian Hetrick