There is an urgent need for vaccines and therapeutics to prevent and treat COVID-19. Rapid SARS-CoV-2 countermeasure development is contingent on the availability of robust, scalable, and readily deployable surrogate viral assays to screen antiviral humoral responses, define correlates of immune protection, and down-select candidate antivirals. Here, we generate a highly infectious recombinant vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV) bearing the SARS-CoV-2 spike glycoprotein S as its sole entry glycoprotein and show that this recombinant virus, rVSV-SARS-CoV-2 S, closely resembles SARS-CoV-2 in its entry-related properties. The neutralizing activities of a large panel of COVID-19 convalescent sera can be assessed in a high-throughput fluorescent reporter assay with rVSV-SARS-CoV-2 S, and neutralization of rVSV-SARS-CoV-2 S and authentic SARS-CoV-2 by spike-specific antibodies in these antisera is highly correlated. Our findings underscore the utility of rVSV-SARS-CoV-2 S for the development of spike-specific therapeutics and for mechanistic studies of viral entry and its inhibition.

迫切需要预防和治疗COVID-19的疫苗和治疗剂。SARS-CoV-2快速对策的发展取决于健壮，可扩展且易于部署的替代病毒检测方法的可用性，以筛选抗病毒体液反应，定义免疫保护的相关性以及选择候选抗病毒剂。在这里，我们产生了以SARS-CoV-2穗状糖蛋白S作为唯一进入糖蛋白的高度感染性重组水疱性口炎病毒（VSV），并表明该重组病毒rVSV-SARS-CoV-2 S与SARS-CoV非常相似-2在其与条目相关的属性中。可以使用rVSV-SARS-CoV-2 S在高通量荧光报告基因分析中评估一大批COVID-19恢复期血清的中和活性，这些抗血清中的刺突特异性抗体与rVSV-SARS-CoV-2 S和真正的SARS-CoV-2的中和作用高度相关。我们的发现强调了rVSV-SARS-CoV-2 S在开发突波特异性疗法以及病毒进入及其抑制机制方面的实用性。