Vaccines & Immune Biology

Linda McAllister and Michael Royals of PharmaJet, Inc. in the U.S. will research the mechanisms that make intradermal vaccine delivery more effective than intramuscular vaccines. Understanding how immunizations via the skin work and why reduced doses are needed in this method can enable more cost effective approaches to polio eradication and other global public health problems.

Milosz Faber of Thomas Jefferson University in the U.S. will develop a combined contraceptive rabies vaccine that both protects dogs against rabies and reduces their population levels in order to control the incidence of human rabies. Human rabies causes 70,000 deaths annually and is mostly spread by dogs. Current therapeutic approaches to control dog rabies require multiple doses and have had limited success. Faber has designed a safe dog rabies variant that can induce a strong and long-lasting immune response when introduced in mice.

Brian Foy of Colorado State University in the U.S. will use antibodies that bind essential proteins in the mosquito Anopheles in order to block malaria transmission. They have already produced antibodies that bind conserved mosquito antigens such as the glutamate-gated chloride channel and used them to supplement blood meals, which was lethal to feeding mosquitoes. They will test whether cattle injected with these antigens produce the corresponding antibodies that are also lethal to the mosquitoes that feed off them.

Gong Cheng of Tsinghua University in China will develop a transmission-blocking vaccine against dengue virus that takes advantage of blocking mosquito infection by targeting the transmission from human to mosquito.

Hua Wang of Tsinghua University in China will use reverse vaccinology, working backwards from host broadly neutralizing antibodies, to design and discover vaccines against HIV infection.

Zhengsong Weng of Tsinghua University in China will use reverse vaccinology to seek new antigens for Streptococcus pneumonia to develop new vaccines against bacterial pneumonia.

Haiteng Deng of Tsinghua University in China will identify new candidate antigens for vaccines to prevent tuberculosis.

Shan Feng of Tsinghua University in China will develop a novel reagent called DCAF to eliminate antibody-dependence-enhanced (ADE) Dengue virus infection. DCAF stands for Dual-functional Conjugate of Antigenic peptide and Fc-III tag, which is designed for the blocking of cross-reactive antibodies that can enhance secondary infection of Dengue virus. In the current phase, they will synthesize a group of DCAF molecules to test their binding affinities with the antibodies of Dengue virus 2 and to evaluate whether these molecules can be used to block the ADE process.

Steven Patterson of Imperial College in London will develop a new vaccine strategy that exploits the property of a protein, retinaldehyde dehydrogenase (RALDH), that stimulates immune cells to travel to the gut mucosa and there provide localized immune protection against inhabiting pathogens such as HIV. Using vaccines to generate immune responses specifically at mucosal surfaces such as in the gut or lungs, which are major sites of pathogen entry, is challenging, particularly when the vaccine must be administered with a needle, which delivers it to non-mucosal sites.

Ian Cockburn from the Australian National University in Australia will test two approaches to improve vaccines by increasing competition for the vaccine antigen by immune cells and prolonging the survival of those immune cells. Antibody-producing B cells develop in so-called germinal centers within lymph nodes in response to infections or vaccinations. However, many diseases including malaria lack effective vaccines.