Bacterial meningitis remains an important cause of global morbidity and mortality. Although effective vaccinations exist and are being increasingly used worldwide, bacterial diversity threatens their impact and the ultimate goal of eliminating the disease. Through genomic epidemiology, we can appreciate bacterial population structure and its consequences for transmission dynamics, virulence, an...

Toxoid vaccines--vaccines based on inactivated bacterial toxins--are routinely used to promote antitoxin immunity for the treatment and prevention of bacterial infections. Following chemical or heat denaturation, inactivated toxins can be administered to mount toxin-specific immune responses. However, retaining faithful antigenic presentation while removing toxin virulence remains a major chall...

Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) is a major cause of bacterial meningitis among children. Hib conjugate vaccines have effectively prevented Hib infection, and routine immunization with Hib conjugate vaccine has diminished the incidence of the disease in the United States and European countries. Introduction of Hib conjugate vaccines is also required in Japan. However, endotoxin that can carr...

In today's medical industry, the range of vaccines that exist for administration in humans represents an eclectic variety of forms and immunologic mechanisms. Namely, these are the live attenuated viruses, inactivated viruses, subunit proteins, and virus-like particles for treating virus-caused diseases, as well as the bacterial-based polysaccharide, protein, and conjugated vaccines. Currently,...

This review is focused on the use of hyperimmune globulin therapy to treat some infectious diseases viral or bacterial origin. Despite introduction antibiotics and vaccines, plasma immunoglobulin from whole blood donation can still play a key role. These treatments provide passive transfer high-titer antibodies that either reduces risk severity infection offer immediate but short-term protectio...

Although current influenza vaccines are effective in general, there is an urgent need for the development of new technologies to improve vaccine production timelines, capacities and immunogenicity. Herein, we describe the development of an influenza vaccine technology which enables recombinant production of highly efficient influenza vaccines in bacterial expression systems. The globular head d...

Although the questions of immunity induced by bacterial vaccines and of the type of vaccine best suited to the purpose have received a wealth of attention, renewed interest in this aspect of immunology has become manifest since the basic differences between smooth and rough bacterial strains have become recognized. That such qualities as smoothness and roughness are more than superficial and ac...

BACKGROUND Conjugate vaccines in which polysaccharide antigens are covalently linked to carrier proteins belong to the most effective and safest vaccines against bacterial pathogens. State-of-the art production of conjugate vaccines using chemical methods is a laborious, multi-step process. In vivo enzymatic coupling using the general glycosylation pathway of Campylobacter jejuni in recombinant...

Aquaculture has become an important economic sector worldwide, but is faced with an ongoing threat from infectious diseases. Vaccination plays a critical role in protecting commercially raised fish from bacterial, viral and parasitic diseases. However, the production of effective vaccines is limited by the scarcity of knowledge about the immune system of fish. Improving vaccines implies using a...

The impending influenza virus pandemic requires global vaccination to prevent large-scale mortality and morbidity, but traditional influenza virus vaccine production is too slow for rapid responses. In this study, bacterial system has been developed for expression and purification of properly folded HA1 antigen as a rapid response to emerging pandemic strains. Here, a recombinant H5N1 (A/Indone...