Vaccines & Immune Biology

When blood-consuming sand flies transmit leishmaniasis they also inject substances from their saliva into humans that are necessary for small numbers of parasites to establish infection. William Wheat from Colorado State University in the U.S. will test whether a vaccine that neutralizes an important sand fly saliva component (maxadilan) will prevent parasitic infection.

Ofer Levy at Children's Hospital Boston in the U.S. will determine whether synthetic molecules called imidazoquinolines activate newborns' white blood cells, and could be used as candidate vaccine adjuvants to dramatically enhance immunization at birth. In this project's Phase I research, Levy demonstrated that Toll-like Receptor-7 and -8 agonists are superior to agonists of other Toll-like receptors and to alum, an already approved vaccine adjuvant, in activating newborn immune responses in studies in vitro.

Laser light at a specific setting can activate antigen presenting cells in the skin and temporarily make cellular membranes permeable. Mei X. Wu and colleagues at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School in the U.S. will test whether injection of a vaccine into laser-exposed skin can significantly enhance immune responses stimulated by the vaccine.

BK virus is a very common and non-pathogenic virus that persists in specific organs for long periods of time. Simon Lacey of Beckman Research Institute of the City of Hope in the U.S. proposes using an engineered BK virus as a vaccine vector to introduce HIV polyepitope sequences in hopes of inducing a strong and long- lasting immune response against HIV.

In organisms that have extreme mutation rates, such as RNA viruses, quasispecies are highly diverse genotypes that may drastically differ from the general population and often become less viable as they continue to mutate. Using new deep sequencing technology, Marco Vignuzzi of the Pasteur Institute in France hopes to identify such RNA viruses that have managed to retain attenuated strains in order to study these genotypes for possible use in the development of viral vaccines.

Because Leishmania is transmitted to humans when sand flies feed on humans, Jesus Valenzuela of the National Institutes of Health in the U.S. proposes to develop a novel vaccine against salivary proteins of sand flies with the aim to induce a strong immune response against the parasite.

Brendan Wren of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine in the UK will test a new bacterial synthesis method, Protein Glycan Coupling Technology. This method uses bacteria to attach proteins to glycans to produce glycoconjugate vaccines, and it could lead to an improved vaccine against pneumococcal disease. This project's Phase I research demonstrated that a Streptococcus pneumoniae capsular polysaccharide could be transferred to a carrier protein in E. coli.

Andrew Heath of University of Sheffield in the U.K. will research whether the immune responses to DNA vaccines can be enhanced with novel adjuvants.

Dr. Yen Wah Tong of the National University of Singapore will attempt to fabricate nanoscale, imprinted particles that can capture viruses, effectively preventing them from infecting cells. These non-toxic and biocompatible polymers can then be excreted from the body. This synthetic equivalent to natural antibodies would eliminate the need for a human immune response and resulting mutations of the virus' DNA.

Huan Nguyen of the International Vaccine Institute in Korea will explore whether green fluorescent protein is endowed with unique immunological properties which could be used to develop a universal flu vaccine.