Traditional and novel approaches to flavivirus vaccines

Yellow fever, dengue, Japanese encephalitis and tick-borne encephalitis viruses are the medically most important members of the Flavivirus genus composed primarily of arboviruses. In this paper, we review the commercially available traditional flavivirus vaccines against yellow fever, Japanese encephalitis, and tick-borne encephalitis, as well as modern approaches to flavivirus vaccines. Formalin inactivation technology has been employed to produce killed vaccines. Flaviviruses have been attenuated by multiple passages in animal tissues and cell cultures to produce empirical live attenuated vaccines. The use of traditional methods is being pursued to develop vaccines against other flavivirus diseases, such as dengue, and to improve existing vaccines, such as for Japanese encephalitis. With the recent development of infectious clones, rational approaches to attenuated flavivirus vaccines have employed the introduction of specific mutations into wild type viruses and chimerisation between different viruses. Novel methods for delivery of live vaccines, such as inoculation of infectious DNA or RNA, have been described. Other approaches, such as the construction of protein subunit, expression vector-based and naked DNA vaccines, have been proposed to create alternate vaccine candidates.