Irradiation for vaccine development

A mini review on the use of irradiation for vaccine development was just published online in Frontiers in Immunology. The review highlights the potential of ionizing radiation as a vaccine technology suitable against several pathogens causing diseases in various hosts species. This has been most recently demonstrated in the rapid development of vaccine candidates in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, caused by the virus SARS-CoV-2.

Radio-vaccines have been investigated as a response to previous outbreaks of SARS and MERS, and it was hypothesized that ionizing radiation could be used to rapidly produce a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2 The authors, Sohini Bathia and Suresh Pillai of the National Center for Electron Beam Research believe that the recent availability of new small low-energy electron and X-ray equipment could trigger renewed interest in using ionizing radiation for vaccines.

The article can be found here.