Vaccines & Immune Biology

Daniel Rock of the University of Illinois in the U.S. will develop a multivalent vector vaccine from the ubiquitous Orf virus that can protect ruminants from multiple diseases with a single dose. Current vaccines for a variety of animal diseases that cause substantial economic costs in the developing world are expensive and require multiple doses. The Orf virus has a wide host range, induces robust and long-lasting antiviral immunity, and can be extensively modified to express antigens from a variety of viruses.

Daniel González of the University of Texas at San Antonio in the U.S. will work to engineer a probiotic yeast into a strain that can deliver antigens directly to the intestinal mucosal immune system. This yeast strain could be developed into an oral vaccine delivery vehicle that can accommodate a wide variety vaccine candidates.

Christian Ockenhouse of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in the U.S. and Alan Cowman of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Australia seek to generate a transgenic P. falciparum malaria parasite that can be used to assess the efficacy of P. vivax-based circumsporozoite vaccines.

Garry Blakely of the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom will engineer a common gut bacterium to express antigens from pathogens that cause diarrhea onto nanoscale outer membrane vesicles. These nanoparticles could be the basis for a new generation of biocompatible oral vaccines that will protect against diarrheal disease.

Matt Cottingham of The Jenner Institute at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom will work to engineer an adenovirus vaccine vector that includes HIV antigens as well as the immune evasion genes of cytomegalovirus (CMV). Such a vector could be used in an HIV vaccine to elicit the strong immune response typical of a CMV-vectored vaccine, but without the typical safety issues that accompany the use of CMV in vaccines.

John McGiven of the Animal Health Veterinary Laboratories Agency in the United Kingdom, along with David Bundle of the University of Alberta in Canada, will evaluate a glycoconjugate vaccine for brucellosis that is safe, stable, inexpensive, and efficacious. Complementary diagnostics will allow for the differentiation of vaccinated and infected subjects and assist in the control of this insidious zoonotic disease. They will test both the vaccine and the diagnostic in a standardized mouse model.

Ralph Tripp from the University of Georgia in the U.S. and Carl Kirkwood of Murdoch Children's Research Institute in Australia will engineer mammalian cell lines for the development of vaccines and therapies against human noravirus and related enteric viruses. Noravirus is highly contagious and causes acute gastroenteritis, which can be serious in young children and the elderly. However, studying the virus and developing much needed new therapies has been difficult because mammalian cells are unable to support replication of the virus and grow in culture.

Irina Caminschi of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Australia will test whether a prototype malaria vaccine which targets a newly identified dendritic cell molecule will produce a strong antibody response without the use of adjuvants.

Recent evidence suggests that HIV infection may be drastically enhanced when a specific protein found in human semen is present in fibril form. David Eisenberg of UCLA in the U.S. will design and test a small peptide that can effectively block formation of fibrils on this protein. If successful, the therapy could be administered via spray or liquid drops to inhibit transmission of HIV.

Kuan-Teh Jeang of the National Institutes of Health in the U.S. will investigate whether cells infected by one virus become resistant to infection from other viruses, and if this viral interference can confer protection against HIV. The team will develop an attenuated virus to test whether over-expression of viral envelope proteins within cells can confer resistance to further HIV infection.