MenDeVAR Index published in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology

Meningococcal Deduced Vaccine Antigen Reactivity (MenDeVAR) Index: a Rapid and Accessible Tool that Exploits Genomic Data in Public Health and Clinical Microbiology Applications

Journal of Clinical Microbiology Oct 2020, JCM.02161-20; DOI: 10.1128/JCM.02161-20

Meningococcal vaccines have had a profound impact on reducing the burden of this disease in multiple global settings. The protein-polysaccharide conjugate meningococcal vaccines have demonstrated efficacy at inducing both direct and indirect protection (herd immunity). For serogroup B meningococci, however, conjugate polysaccharide vaccines have not been developed, due to their similarity to human neural tissue antigens. Consequently, protein-based vaccines, using subcapsular antigens have been developed. Two different vaccines have been licenced, with different protein components, by two different pharmaceutical companies: 4CMenB (Bexsero, GSK) and rLP2086 (Trumenba, Pfizer).

The use of surface proteins as vaccine antigens is complicated by the inherent diversity of such proteins, particularly for the meningococcus, as a these are subject to host immune selection as part of the human oropharyngeal microbiota. Therefore, the impact of these protein vaccines on circulating meningococcal can be variable, depending on which protein variants are present and expressed in a given disease-causing isolate.

Public health practitioners make decisions about vaccine deployment on both an individual and population scale. If a patient with meningococcal B disease is identified, their contacts are traced and can be offered meningococcal vaccines, but the choice of vaccine to give depends on the specific vaccine antigen variants in the case disease isolate.  The MenDeVAR Index provides these professionals with a rapid and accessible method to derive this information following genome sequencing of the disease isolate.  MenDeVAR Index identifies the vaccine variants present in a given disease strain and indexes complex experimental data (phenotypic) that informs the likelihood of the vaccine preventing this strain causing infection.

You can see the MenDeVAR Index for any isolate found on PubMLST, or you can use https://pubmlst.org/bigsdb?db=pubmlst_neisseria_mendevar to directly query your individual PCR products or whole genome sequences.