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objective(s): soluble leishmania antigens (sla) provide suitable protection against leishmaniasis in murine model when delivered by an appropriate delivery system. liposomes have been shown to be suitable vaccine delivery systems against leishmaniasis, however, the phospholipase-a (pla) activity of sla is a drawback to prepare a stable liposomal sla. one strategy to overcome this problem might ...

T he lung is one of the few organs in the human body where there is a continuous and extensive interaction between the environment and our immune system. With every breath we take, numerous airborne particles, both harmless as well as potentially dangerous, are inhaled into the airways. The big challenge for the pulmonary immune system is to discriminate the good from the bad and to react accor...

Immunoblotting has provided a powerful and effective approach to dissection of the immune response to mycobacterial antigens in a situation in which the availability of isolated antigenic components is severely limited. The basic approach of blotting on to a solid-phase support has been used in combination with SDS/polyacrylamide-gel electrophoresis, t.l.c., recombinant DNA technology and T-cel...

One of the main tasks of the immune system is to discriminate and appropriately react to "danger" or "non-danger" signals. This is crucial in the gastrointestinal tract, where the immune system is confronted with a myriad of food antigens and symbiotic microflora that are in constant contact with the mucosa, in addition to any potential pathogens. This large number of antigens and commensal mic...

Factors that determine the immunogenicity of an antigen in vivo are still largely unknown. Direct administration of antigens into lymphatic organs appears to enhance immune response. We hypothesized that systemically targeting antigens to lymphatic tissue in vivo might modulate immunity. To test this hypothesis, we measured the humoral immune response elicited by bacteriophage vaccination. We s...

The targets for the immune system are antigens present on cancer cells; however, many are not cancer-specific and may also be found on normal tissues. These antigens are often products of mutated cellular genes, aberrantly expressed normal genes, or genes encoding viral proteins. Vaccines constitute an active and specific immunotherapy designed to stimulate the intrinsic antitumor immune respon...

Previous studies have compared the immune systems of wild and of laboratory rodents in an effort to determine how laboratory rodents differ from their naturally occurring relatives. This comparison serves as an indicator of what sorts of changes might exist between modern humans living in Western culture compared to our hunter-gatherer ancestors. However, immunological experiments on wild-caugh...

BACKGROUND Analysis of circulating immune complexes (CICs) produced during an immune response may be useful in elucidating some aspects of this process. Identification of antigens incorporated into CICs provides information that may be helpful in developing diagnostic and treatment strategies for autoimmune diseases, infection, cancer, and transplantation therapy, and such information might be ...