Sarah N. Wilson

A durable superhydrophobic ZnO/10Cu coating integrates passive bacterial repulsion with physiological nitric oxide generation, reducing surface bacterial attachment while actively eliminating planktonic bacteria.

Vaccination remains critical for viral disease outbreak prevention and control, but conventional vaccine development typically involves trade-offs between safety and immunogenicity. We used a recently discovered insect-specific flavivirus as a vector in order to develop an exceptionally safe, flavivirus vaccine candidate with single-dose efficacy. To evaluate the safety and efficacy of this platform, we created a chimeric Zika virus (ZIKV) vaccine candidate, designated Aripo/Zika virus (ARPV/ZIKV). ZIKV has caused immense economic and public health impacts throughout the Americas and remains a significant public health threat. ARPV/ZIKV vaccination showed exceptional safety due to ARPV/ZIKV’s inherent vertebrate host-restriction. ARPV/ZIKV showed no evidence of replication or translation in vitro and showed no hematological, histological or pathogenic effects in vivo. A single-dose immunization with ARPV/ZIKV induced rapid and robust neutralizing antibody and cellular responses, which offered complete protection against ZIKV-induced morbidity, mortality and in utero transmission in immune-competent and -compromised murine models. Splenocytes derived from vaccinated mice demonstrated significant CD4⁺ and CD8⁺ responses and significant cytokine production post-antigen exposure. Altogether, our results further support that chimeric insect-specific flaviviruses are a promising strategy to restrict flavivirus emergence via vaccine development.

La Crosse virus (LACV) is the leading cause of pediatric viral encephalitis in North America, and is an important public health pathogen. Historically, studies involving LACV pathogenesis have focused on lineage I strains, but no former work has explored the pathogenesis between or within lineages. Given the absence of LACV disease in endemic regions where a robust entomological risk exists, we hypothesize that some LACV strains are attenuated and demonstrate reduced neuroinvasiveness. Herein, we compared four viral strains representing all three lineages to determine differences in neurovirulence or neuroinvasiveness using three murine models. A representative strain from lineage I was shown to be the most lethal, causing >50% mortality in each of the three mouse studies. However, other strains only presented excessive mortality (>50%) within the suckling mouse neurovirulence model. Neurovirulence was comparable among strains, but viruses differed in their neuroinvasive capacities. Our studies also showed that viruses within lineage III vary in pathogenesis with contemporaneous strains, showing reduced neuroinvasiveness compared to an ancestral strain from the same U.S. state (i.e., Connecticut). These findings demonstrate that LACV strains differ markedly in pathogenesis, and that strain selection is important for assessing vaccine and therapeutic efficacies.