Superior Potency of Synthetic Virus-like Structures in Vaccine-Induced Antibody Responses Compared to Qβ Bacteriophage Virus-like Particles

Virus-like particles are a well-established platform for vaccines, although the molecular mechanisms that underlie the extraordinary potency of many virus-like particles in eliciting strong antibody responses remain incompletely understood. Here, we show that synthetic virus-like structures, a new platform that we have recently developed, are superior to bacteriophage Qβ-based virus-like particles for the induction of long-term neutralizing antibody responses. For the same antigen, both platforms induced antibodies with comparable affinities. The resulting antigen-specific antibodies had similar binding on-rates and off-rates. However, synthetic virus-like structures induced a much higher concentration of functional antibodies in the serum than Qβ-based virus-like particles, suggesting that synthetic virus-like structures are more potent than Qβ-based virus-like particles in the induction of long-lived plasma cells.