[Development of an alternative method to the monkey neurovirulence test for oral poliovirus vaccines] [Article in German]

Abstract

Each oral poliovirus vaccine lot contains attenuated and small amounts of wildtype viruses. Vaccines containing more than a certain limit of wildtype viruses may cause a vaccine associated poliomyelitis. To provide safe vaccines for humans, each newly manufactured vaccine lot is tested in the monkey neurovirulence test. A certain point mutation on the poliovirus genome has been shown to be responsible for the attenuated phenotype of the vaccine virus.
We developed a quantitative PCR method to determine the wildtype proportion at position 472 of poliovirus type 3 genome.
This method possibly can be used as an alternative for the monkey neurovirulence test.