Vaccines & Immune Biology

Wendy Picking and a team at Oklahoma State University in the U.S. will work to develop a new vaccine for Salmonella that uses a serotype-independent Salmonella antigen combined with an adjuvant to deliver immunity against all serotypes of the bacteria. This vaccine, when administered intradermally, could be a cost-effective way to reduce the overall incidence and severity of diarrhea in children in the developing world.

Arturo Casadevall of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the U.S. will work to develop a new vaccine for tuberculosis that uses an arabinomannan-protein conjugate to elicit strong antibody-mediated immunity. M. tuberculosis has a polysaccharide capsule composed of arabinomannan, which, when used as part of a vaccine, could lead to an immune response that prevents inflammation and disease transmission without impairing clearance of the bacteria.

Brad Stone of the Benaroya Research Institute in the U.S., along with Sean Murphy of the University of Washington, will produce large and complex "mini-gene" libraries of DNA fragments encoding thousands of peptides from malaria parasite proteins, and use them for rapid production and testing of complex malaria vaccine formulations.

Joshy Jacob of Emory University in the U.S. will test the hypothesis that immunizing newborns with soluble rather than particulate antigens will overcome maternal- mediated suppression of infant immune responses to vaccines. By overcoming the ability of maternal antibodies to suppress vaccine-induced immunity, vaccinations could be given earlier, accelerating protective immunity in the first few months of life.

James Beeson and Damien Drew of the Burnet Institute in Australia propose to generate chimeric Plasmodium falciparum that expresses the antigens of another malaria parasite, P. vivax, allowing them to be evaluated as vaccine candidates. Because laboratory culturing of P. vivax is costly and technically difficult, this new method could help accelerate the development of vaccines against malaria caused by P. vivax.

Silvia Vendetti of Istituto Superiore di Sanità in Italy proposes to improve vaccine immunization by transiently accumulating a high number of antigen-specific precursor cells in the lymph nodes at the time of immunization using agents that modulate cell migration as a new vaccine technology platform.

Carlo Montemagno of the University of Cincinnati in the U.S. proposes to develop hollow microcapsules with pores that only form at neutral pH, allowing vaccines in the capsules to be released only after bypassing the acidic stomach environment and arriving at the mucosal tissues of the lower gastrointestinal tract. This new oral vaccine delivery system could allow highly immunogenic vaccines to be administered with increased efficacy and allow for vaccine dose-sparing.

Eva Stoger of the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Austria proposes to engineer edible cereal seeds such as maize and barley to produce recombinant antigens for use in edible multi-component subunit vaccines against infectious diseases. These oral vaccines would employ bioencapsulation to ensure efficient delivery to the gut mucosa.

Joel Collier and colleagues at the University of Chicago in the U.S. will design and test self-assembling peptide vaccine materials that are stable in the face of significant temperature fluctuations. These self-adjuvanting systems may be more easily distributed to the developing world than current temperature-sensitive vaccines.

Panduranga Rao and Nagendra Hegde of Ella Foundation in India will develop and test for use in a vaccine a live single-cycle poliovirus that has been modified to eliminate the gene essential for replication. This highly disabled virus will be tested for its immunogenicity and its inability to re-emerge as vaccine-derived poliovirus (VDPV).