Attenuated live Salmonella enterica are useful carriers for the delivery of heterologous antigens for vaccination. Effector proteins translocated by type III secretion systems (T3SS) of Salmonella have been successfully utilized for antigen delivery. Here we investigated the use of effector proteins of the T3SS encoded by Salmonella Pathogenicity Island 2 (SPI2). We observed that the effector p...

Malaria starts with infection of the host liver by Plasmodium sporozoites. Inoculation with radiation-attenuated Plasmodium sporozoites induces complete protection against malaria. Protection is mediated by dendritic cells (DCs) and CD8(+) T cells, but the source of parasite antigens mediating this response remains unclear. Here, we show that hepatocytes infected with irradiated Plasmodium spor...

Salmonella enterica is a versatile live carrier for the presentation of recombinant vaccine antigens. Fusion proteins of a type III secretion system effector and heterologous vaccine antigens can be translocated by live attenuated Salmonella strains and mediate protective immunity against infections. Here we investigated the use expression cassettes for translocated fusion protein consisting of...

Malaria remains the most prevalent and devastating parasitic disease worldwide. Vaccination is considered to be an approach that will complement other strategies for prevention and control of the disease in the future. In the last 10 years, intense studies aimed at the development of a malaria vaccine have provided important knowledge of the nature of the host immunological mechanisms of protec...

Reverse vaccinology (RV) is a bioinformatics approach that can predict antigens with protective potential from the protein coding genomes of bacterial pathogens for subunit vaccine design. RV has become firmly established following the development of the BEXSERO® vaccine against Neisseria meningitidis serogroup B. RV studies have begun to incorporate machine learning (ML) techniques to distingu...

There is an urgent medical need for improved vaccines with broad serovar coverage and high efficacy against systemic salmonellosis. Subunit vaccines offer excellent safety profiles but require identification of protective antigens, which remains a challenging task. Here, I review crucial properties of Salmonella antigens that might help to narrow down the number of potential candidates from mor...

Due to drawbacks of live attenuated vaccines, much more attention has been focused on screening of Brucella protective antigens as subunit vaccine candidates. Brucella is a facultative intracellular bacterium and cell mediated immunity plays essential roles for protection against Brucella infection. Identification of Brucella antigens that present T-cell epitopes to the host could enable develo...

OBJECTIVE To assess the antibody response to influenza vaccine of children vertically infected with HIV. DESIGN Prospective study in HIV infected children vaccinated during the winter of 1994-5. SETTING Family HIV clinic at St Mary's Hospital, Paddington. SUBJECTS 25 children, aged 1-11 years, vertically infected with HIV. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Responses to influenza antigens (H1N1-A/Ta...

Background: Toxoplasma gondii is an obligate intracellular parasite that infects all mammalian cells. Several antigens such as excreted/secreted antigens have been identified as a potential vaccine candidate. Objective: To determine how excreted/secreted antigens from peritoneal exudates of infected mice (mESA) stimulate cell-mediated immune responses and induce protective immunity against toxo...

The potential ability of virus antigens to cause autoimmune responses and subsequent disease is known. It has been also shown that autoantibody production revealed in HIV-infected patients may be one of the key factors of AIDS pathogenesis. Therefore design of chimeric antigens, combining potentially protective epitopes both humoral and cellular immune responses, should be carried out with some...