Recently approved in Europe and Australia, the multi-component meningococcal B vaccine, 4CMenB (Bexsero®, Novartis Vaccines and Diagnostics), contains three surface-exposed recombinant proteins (fHbp, NadA, and NHBA) and New Zealand strain outer membrane vesicles (NZ OMV) with PorA 1.4 antigenicity. This comprehensive review of the 4CMenB clinical development program covers pivotal phase I/IIb/...

Neisseria meningitidis is hosted only by humans and colonizes the nasopharynx; it survives in the human body by reaching an equilibrium with its exclusive host. Indeed, while cases of invasive disease are rare, the number of asymptomatic Neisseria meningitides carriers is far higher. The aim of this paper is to summarize the current knowledge of survival strategies of Neisseria meningitides aga...

Characterization of meningococci isolated from the pharynx is essential towards understanding the dynamics of meningococcal carriage and disease. Meningococcal isolates, collected from adolescents resident in Salvador, Brazil during 2014, were characterized by multilocus sequence typing, genotyping or whole-genome sequencing. Most were nongroupable (61.0%), followed by genogroups B (11.9%) and ...

Neisseria meningitidis is a nasopharyngeal commensal of humans which occasionally invades the blood to cause septicaemia. The transcriptome of N. meningitidis strain MC58 grown in human blood for up to 4 hours was determined and around 10% of the genome was found to be differentially regulated. The nuo, pet and atp operons, involved in energy metabolism, were up-regulated, while many house-keep...

The extracellular proteome (secretome) of periodontitis-associated bacteria may constitute a major link between periodontitis and systemic diseases. To obtain an overview of the virulence potential of Aggregatibacter actinomycetemcomitans, an oral and systemic human pathogen implicated in aggressive periodontitis, we used a combined LC-MS/MS and bioinformatics approach to characterize the secre...

INTRODUCTION Meningococcal disease is an infection caused by Neisseria meningitidis, and those of serogroup B are currently the most predominant. It has been difficult to create effective vaccines for this serogroup in order to modify or reduce its morbidity. The aim of this study was to review existing data on the new vaccine 4CMenB and its potential contribution to the prevention of this infe...

Neisseria meningitidis is an antigenically and genetically variable Gram-negative bacterium and a causative agent of meningococcal meningitis and septicaemia. Meningococci encode many outer membrane proteins, including Opa, Opc, Msf, fHbp and NadA, identified as being involved in colonisation of the host and evasion of the immune response. Although vaccines are available for the prevention of s...

Although capsular polysaccharide (CPS) is critical for meningococcal virulence, the molecular basis of alternative complement pathway (AP) regulation by meningococcal CPSs remains unclear. Using serum with only the AP active, the ability of strains to generate C3a (a measure of C3 activation) and subsequently deposit C3 fragments on bacteria was studied in encapsulated group A, B, C, W-135, and...

In this paper, we describe the first implementation and performance of a fast O(NlogN) hierarchical backprojection algorithm for cone beam CT with a circular trajectory,developed on a modern Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). The resulting tomographic backprojection system for 3D cone beam geometry combines speedup through algorithmic improvements provided by the hierarchical backprojection algori...