CRISPR Engineering of Bacteriophage T4 to Design Vaccines Against SARS-CoV-2 and Emerging Pathogens

• Published in: Methods in molecular biology (Clifton, N.J.) Vol. 2410; p. 209
• Main Authors: Zhu, Jingen, Ananthaswamy, Neeti, Jain, Swati, Batra, Himanshu, Tang, Wei-Chun, Rao, Venigalla B
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States 2022
• Subjects: Animals; Bacteriophage T4 - genetics; Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats; COVID-19 - prevention & control; COVID-19 Vaccines; Humans; Mice; Pandemics; SARS-CoV-2; Spike Glycoprotein, Coronavirus; Vaccine Development; COVID-19 vaccine; CRISPR engineering; Bacteriophage T4; SARS-CoV-2 spike; Nanoparticle vaccine
• ISSN: 1940-6029
• DOI: 10.1007/978-1-0716-1884-4_10

The COVID-19 pandemic brought to the fore the urgent need for vaccine design and delivery platforms that can be rapidly deployed for manufacture and distribution. Though the mRNA and adenoviral vector platforms have been enormously successful to control SARS-CoV-2 viral infections, it is unclear if this could be replicated against more complex pathogens or the emerging variants. Recently, we described a "universal" platform that can incorporate multiple vaccine targets into the same nanoparticle scaffold by CRISPR engineering of bacteriophage T4. A T4-COVID vaccine designed with this technology elicited broad immunogenicity and complete protection against virus challenge in a mouse model. Here, we describe the detailed methodology to generate recombinant bacteriophage T4 backbones using CRISPR that can also be broadly applicable to other bacteriophages that abundantly pervade the Earth.