Rotavirus vaccines hold promise to decrease the burden of severe diarrhea in the poorest countries, where 85% of deaths due to rotavirus occur. However, the potency of live oral vaccines is lower in these challenging settings than in middle- and upper-income countries. Many hypotheses have been suggested to explain these differences that could provide clues to improve the ultimate success of th...

Considerable variation in antibody response (AR) was observed among recipients of an injectable typhoid vaccine and an oral cholera vaccine. We sought to find whether polymorphisms in genes of the immune system, both innate and adaptive, were associated with the observed variation in response. For both vaccines, we were able to discover and validate several polymorphisms that were significantly...

The cultivation of plants with specific properties has been the foundation of medicine for milennia. Modern biotechnology may one day extend their medicinal uses to include the delivery of vaccines. Edible vaccines that are heat stable, easy to administer and cheap to produce have the potential to redress many of the production, distribution and delivery limitations faced by traditional vaccine...

In Europe, the elimination of wildlife rabies using oral rabies vaccination [ORV] of foxes for more than 30 years has been a success story. Since a comprehensive review on the scope of the different oral rabies vaccine baits distributed across Europe has not been available yet, we evaluated the use of different vaccine baits over the entire period of ORV [1978-2014]. Our findings provide valuab...

Live attenuated bacteria are of increasing importance in biotechnology and medicine in the emerging field of cancer immunotherapy. Oral DNA vaccination mediated by live attenuated bacteria often suffers from low infection efficiency due to various biological barriers during the infection process. To this end, we herein report, for the first time, a new strategy to engineer cationic nanoparticle...

An effective strategy for preventing rabies consists of controlling rabies in the host reservoir with vaccination. Rabies vaccine has proven to be the most effective weapon for coping with this fatal viral zoonotic disease of warm-blooded animals, including human. Natural rabies infection of an individual is always associated with exposure to rabid animals, and the duration of clinical signs ca...