Key result
Transmissible viral vaccines offer the potential to increase herd immunity but pose significant epidemiological and evolutionary challenges, such as reversion to virulence.
Transmissible viral vaccines offer the potential to increase herd immunity but require careful integration of engineering, evolution, and epidemiology to mitigate risks of vaccine evolution.
Warrants caution before deployment; leaves open whether engineering can fully mitigate evolutionary risks.
Genetic engineering now enables the design of live viral vaccines that are potentially transmissible. Some designs merely modify a single viral genome to improve on the age-old method of attenuation whereas other designs create chimeras of viral genomes. Transmission has the benefit of increasing herd immunity above that achieved by direct vaccination alone but also increases the opportunity for vaccine evolution, which typically undermines vaccine utility. Different designs have different epidemiological consequences but also experience different evolution. Approaches that integrate vaccine engineering with an understanding of evolution and epidemiology will reap the greatest benefit from vaccine transmission.
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Bull et al. (2017) conducted a review in Infectious diseases. Transmissible viral vaccines was evaluated. Transmissible viral vaccines offer the potential to increase herd immunity but pose significant epidemiological and evolutionary challenges, such as reversion to virulence.
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