Engineering the Immune System

During infection, viruses generate copies of their genome and cause illness. For RNA viruses, replication is influenced by the frequencies of certain dinucleotides (CpG, UpA). Prof Simmonds reasons that dinucleotides may be therefore be targets of the innate immune response and has shown that manipulating their frequency is a viable strategy to create effective non-reverting attenuated viral vaccines, and improve production yields of inactivated vaccines through enhancing virus replication.