Imagine a vaccination that can proliferate in a host's body and spread to others around, rapidly and easily defending an entire community from microbial attacks. Several teams around the world are revisiting controversial research in order to build self-spreading vaccinations with this goal in mind.
Their goal is to limit infectious disease transmission in wild animals, reducing the possibility of deadly viruses and germs spreading from wildlife to humans, as many experts believe happened with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that triggered the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States, zoonotic diseases account for 60% of all known infectious diseases and 75% of novel or emerging infections. Scientists have no way of knowing why or when something will occur.Advances in genomics and virology, as well as a better knowledge of disease transmission, have accelerated efforts that began in the 1980s to create genetically modified viruses that move from one animal to another, imparting disease immunity rather than infection immunity.
Researchers are working on self-spreading vaccinations for Ebola, bovine tuberculosis, and Lassa fever, a viral disease spread by rats that causes 300,000 infections each year in regions of West Africa. Other zoonotic illnesses, such as rabies, West Nile virus, Lyme disease, and the plague, could be targeted using this method.
Self-spreading vaccine proponents argue that they could transform public health by blocking infectious disease propagation among animals before a zoonotic spillover occurs, potentially preventing the next pandemic.
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