1. Abstract 2. Introduction 3. Stress protein families and their immunological properties 3.1. Chaperoning properties 3.2. Peptide binding properties 3.3. Hsps interact with APCs 4. Immunogenicity of hsps 4.1. Tumor-derived hsp vaccines 4.2. Hsp-peptide based vaccines 4.3. Hsp-protein based vaccines 4.4. Hsp-based DNA vaccines 4.5. Hsp fusion protein vaccines 4.6. Cell-based vaccines 5. Improve...

Chronic hepatitis B is still a major public health issue despite the successful prophylactic vaccination attempts. Chronicity of hepatitis B virus(HBV) is mainly due to its ability to debilitate host's immune system. Therefore, major measures have been taken to stop this process and help patients with chronic hepatitis B infection recover from their illness. While satisfactory results have been...

Objective(s): After decades of containment, pertussis disease, caused by Bordetella pertussis seems to be re-emerging and still remains a major cause of reported vaccine-preventable deaths worldwide. The current licensed whole-cell vaccines display reactogenicity while acellular vaccines are expensive and do not induce Th1-type immune responses that are required for optimum protection against t...

Whooping cough and diphtheria are vaccine preventable diseases. Diphtheria, due to Corynebacterium diphtheriae or Corynebactium ulcerans, two Gram positive bacteria, is a serious upper respiratory tract disease with high morbidity and mortality rates. Vaccination, via an acellular vaccine composed only of purified, detoxified diphtheria toxin, has significantly reduced the incidence of the dise...

Accumulating research suggests that heparanase may be a universal tumor-associated antigen (TAA). Several heparanase T-cell epitopes from humans and mice have already been identified. However, because of low immunogenicity, polypeptide vaccines usually have difficulty inducing effective antitumor immune responses in vivo. In this study, to increase the immunogenicity of polypeptide vaccines, we...

Vaccines are the most cost-effective means of preventing infectious diseases and have the potential to be used in a therapeutic capacity for the treatment of numerous chronic diseases and cancer. The majority of available vaccines function by eliciting antibodies that can neutralize toxins or opsonize the pathogen leading to elimination by professional phagocytes. However, there are many infect...

Rabies is a zoonotic viral disease. The causative agent is a negative-sense RNA genome virus of the genus Lyssavirus (Family: Rhabdoviridae). The disease, commonly transmitted by rabid dogs, is the cause of mortality of over 59000 humans worldwide annually. This disease can be prevented before the development of symptoms through proper vaccination even after exposure. Hence, improvement of the ...

BACKGROUND: Metastasis to the abdominal cavity is the primary cause of morbidity and mortality in patients with ovarian cancer. Beyond surgery and chemotherapy combinations, strategies that target tumor cells in vivo are being investigated, such as the use of recombinant cytokines to up-regulate or modulate the cell-mediated or humoral immune response. METHODS: The authors report on their exper...

Subunit vaccines are safer but less immunogenic than live-attenuated vaccines or whole cell inactivated vaccines. Adjuvants are used to enhance and modulate antigen (Ag) immunogenicity, aiming to induce a protective and long-lasting immune response. Several molecules and formulations have been studied for their adjuvanticity, but only seven have been approved to formulate human vaccines. Metall...

Introduction: The Nef accessory protein is an attractive antigenic candidate in the development of HIV-1 DNA- or protein-based vaccines. The most crucial disadvantage of DNA and protein-based vaccines is their low immunogenicity, which can be improved by cell-penetrating peptides (CPPs) as effective carrier molecules. Methods: In this study, the HIV-1 Nef protein was generated in the Escherichi...