TCB Publications - Abstract

Alexander T. Baker, Ryan J. Boyd, Daipayan Sarkar, John Vant, Alicia Teijeira Crespo, Chloe D. Truong, Emily Bates, Eric Wilson, Chun Kit Chan, Magdalena Lipka-Lloyd, Petra Fromme, Marius Bolni Nagalo, Meike Heurich, Dewight Williams, Po-Lin Chiu, Pierre J. Rizkallah, Alan L. Parker, Abhishek Singharoy, and Mitesh J. Borad. ChAdOx1 interacts with CAR and PF4 with implications for thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome. Science Advances, 7:eabl8213, 2021.

BAKE2021-AS Adenovirus derived vectors, based on chimpanzee adenovirus Y25 (ChAdOx1) and human adenovirus type 26 are proving critical in combatting the 2019 SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Following emergency use authorisation, scale up in vaccine administration has inevitably revealed vaccine related adverse effects; too rare to observe even in large Phase-III clinical trials. These include vaccine-induced thrombotic thrombocytopenia (VITT), an ultra-rare adverse event in which patients develop life-threatening blood clots 5-24 days following vaccination. To investigate vector-host interactions of ChAdOx1 underpinning VITT we solved the structure of the ChAdOx1 capsid by CryoEM, and the structure of the primary receptor tropism determining fiber-knob protein by crystallography. These structural insights have enabled us to unravel key protein interactions involved in ChAdOx1 cell entry and a possible means by which it may generate misplaced immunity to platelet factor 4 (PF4), a protein involved in coagulation. We use in vitro cell binding assays to show that the fiber-knob protein uses coxsackie and adenovirus receptor (CAR) as a high affinity binding partner, while it does not form a stable interface with CD46. Computational simulations identified a putative mechanism by which the ChAdOx1 capsid interacts with PF4 by binding in the spaces between hexon proteins, with downstream implications for the causes of VITT.



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