New frontiers in hepatitis C vaccine development

Abstract

Can the global health community afford to overlook hepatitis C virus (HCV) when nearly 58 million individuals carry the infection worldwide? Despite remarkable strides in direct-acting antiviral therapy, reinfection rates remain troubling, and treatment access in low-resource settings continues to fall short. A preventive vaccine would bridge these gaps, yet no licensed HCV vaccine exists to date. This research examined recent advances in HCV vaccine platforms, with particular emphasis on subunit, viral vector, virus-like particle (VLP), and nucleic acid-based approaches. Preclinical data collected between 2018 and 2023 from published literature were analysed to compare immunogenic profiles across six leading candidate formulations. The investigation drew on serological outcomes from three independent trial cohorts enrolled at the Seoul Institute of Biomedical Sciences between January 2020 and December 2022. A total of 143 healthy adult volunteers aged 19 to 55 were stratified into three groups: an adjuvanted E1/E2 subunit arm (n = 47), a VLP-based arm (n = 52), and a saline placebo arm (n = 44). Seroconversion was defined as a four-fold rise in anti-HCV antibody titer measured by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay at weeks 0, 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24, 28, 32, and 36 post-vaccination. Peak geometric mean titers reached 420 EU/mL in the adjuvanted subunit group at week 16 and 380 EU/mL in the VLP group at week 20. Both active arms outperformed placebo (p