Most vaccines available in the United States have been incorporated into vaccination schedules for infants and young children, age groups particularly at risk of contracting infectious diseases. High universal vaccination coverage is responsible for substantially reducing or nearly eliminating many of the diseases that once killed thousands of children each year in the US. Despite the success o...

BACKGROUND Streptococcus pneumoniae causes widespread morbidity and mortality. Current vaccines contain free polysaccharides or protein-polysaccharide conjugates, and do not induce protection against serotypes that are not included in the vaccines. An affordable and broadly protective vaccine is very desirable. The goal of this study was to determine the optimal formulation of a killed whole ce...

Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) is related to a variety of malignant tumors, and its encoded protein, latent membrane protein 2 (LMP2), is an effective target antigen that is widely used to construct vector vaccines. However, the model cells carrying LMP2 have still not been established to assess the oncolytic effect of LMP2-related vaccines at present. In this study, TC-1-GLUC-LMP2 tumor cells were c...

Historically vaccines were produced using whole attenuated or killed pathogens and still a large proportion of current vaccines utilizes such procedure. However, for safety and quality reasons the development of novel vaccines is preferentially based on the selection and use of specific pathogen components which alone are capable of eliciting protective immune responses against the pathogens th...

While effective preventive vaccines induce intended protective immunity, they also induce unintended adverse events (AEs). Generally speaking, compared to killed, inactivated vaccines and protein vaccines, live attenuated vaccines induce more protective immune responses. However, live attenuated vaccines are also associated with more AEs and even more serious AEs. For example, while live attenu...

The problem with pure recombinant or synthetic antigens used in modern day vaccines is that they are generally far less immunogenic than older style live or killed whole organism vaccines. This has created a major need for improved and more powerful adjuvants for use in these vaccines. With few exceptions, alum remains the sole adjuvant approved for human use in the majority of countries worldw...

This study evaluated and compared the efficacy of a live (intermediate plus strain) and two killed (produced from intermediate plus and intermediate strains of viruses) infectious bursal disease vaccines in commercial Isa brown cockerel chicks. Two hundred and eighty, one day old chicks were divided into four groups of seventy chicks each. Group 1, 2 and 3 were vaccinated with live vaccine, kil...

Several approaches have been developed to improve or replace the only available vaccine for tuberculosis (TB), BCG (Bacille Calmette Guerin). The development of subunit protein vaccines is a promising strategy because it combines specificity and safety. In addition, subunit protein vaccines can be designed to have selected immune epitopes associated with immunomodulating components to drive the...

Equine veterinarians are faced with new commercial vaccines, new efficacy claims, and potential side effects, combined with an increased awareness of the questionable efficacy of established vaccines. These complex issues require of equine veterinarians a more comprehensive understanding of vaccine immunology in order to be able to judge this information. The future promises further change and ...

Three great plague pandemics caused by the gram-negative bacterium Yersinia pestis have killed nearly 200 million people and it has been linked to biowarfare in the past. Plague is endemic in many parts of the world. In addition, the risk of plague as a bioweapon has prompted increased research to develop plague vaccines against this disease. Injectable subunit vaccines are being developed in t...