The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), founded in 1919, is the world authority on chemical nomenclature, terminology (including the naming of new elements in the periodic table), standardized methods for measurement, atomic weights and many other critically-evaluated data in chemistry. Since 2019, the organization has compiled the latest achievements in chemistry and selected the top ten emerging technologies every year. This year, the technology of "low-sugar vaccinations" developed by a research team at Genomics Research Center, led by Chi-Huey Wong, Che Ma and Kuo-I Lin, was selected. It is for the first time that a Taiwanese research work is recognized by IUPAC.
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| Image source: IUPAC |
The concept of low-sugar vaccination was conceived in 2009 and published by the team in the journal Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences of the USA, demonstrating that "the size of sugar molecules" is the key to virus infection and immune evasion. It was for the first time that "quantification of sugar molecules" on the virus surface glycoproteins has been conducted (research news: Removing the Sugar Coat of Influenza Hemagglutinin Proved Better Strategy In Vaccine Design).
Dr. Wong emphasized that“By designing the consensus sequence of hemagglutinin (HA) from different influenza viruses, and trimming the sugar molecules on the surface of the HA protein, particularly on the regions that are difficult to mutate making them fully exposed and recognized by the immune system, is the key to successfully develop molecular vaccines that are protective against a variety of influenza viruses." Based on this foundation, the team continued to explore the glycosylation of viruses and found that in addition to influenza viruses, the sugar trimming approach can also be applied to other human viruses, including, for example, SARS coronavirus, hepatitis C virus, dengue virus and HIV virus. As long as the sugar coat that shields the conserved epitope of a human virus can be removed, it is possible to develop a low-sugar vaccine with broad efficacy!
In 2022, as the COVID-19 pandemic wreaked havoc worldwide, the research team designed a low-sugar vaccine, called Mono-GlcNAc-Decorated S (SMG) protein vaccine, that was shown to elicit broadly protective immune responses against various variants of concerns. Exposing the conserved epitopes, including the sites that are originally sugar-coated and less susceptible to mutation, can trigger a broader immune response and provide better protection against infection from various variants. The virus challenge experiment in transgenic mice showed that the SMG vaccine was effective against the Alpha, Beta and Delta variants (research news: Mono-GlcNAc-decorated spike vaccine is highly effective against COVID-19 variants). This research was published in Science Translational Medicine and is the key publication selected as one of the top ten emerging technologies by IUPAC this year. Similarly, a low-sugar universal mRNA vaccine was successfully developed to protect against various emerging strains, including the recent Omicron variants (research news: mRNA vaccine of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein with deletion of multiple glycosites is broadly protective against variants of concern).
In 2023, an independent research team at Scripps Research also published the application of low-sugar vaccination to HIV vaccine development.
Dr. Ma commented, “The low-sugar vaccine technology has attracted the attention of the global community in the field of vaccine research. Trimming off the unnecessary glycan on viral glycoproteins is a simple and practical approach for designing better vaccines against various human viruses.”
IUPAC full article: https://iupac.org/iupac-2023-top-ten/
Related report:
De Gruyter: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/ci-2023-0403/html