Glypican-3 (GPC3) is overexpressed in human hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) but not expressed in normal tissues except for placenta and fetal liver and therefore is an ideal target for cancer immunotherapy. In this study, we identified an H2-Kb or H2-Db restricted and murine GPC3 (mGPC3)-derived cytotoxic T-lymphocyte (CTL) epitope peptide in C57BL...

BACKGROUND Existing methods to measure influenza vaccine immunogenicity prohibit detailed analysis of epitope determinants recognized by immunoglobulins. The development of highly multiplex proteomics platforms capable of capturing a high level of antibody binding information will enable researchers and clinicians to generate rapid and meaningful readouts of influenza-specific antibody reactivi...

BACKGROUND Cytotoxic T lymphocyte (CTL) vaccine carriers are known to enhance the efficacy of vaccines, but a search for more effective carriers is warranted. Elastin-like polypeptides (ELPs) have been examined for many medical applications but not as CTL vaccine carriers. PURPOSE We aimed to create immune tolerant ELPs using a new polypeptide engineering practice and create CTL vaccine carri...

HER-2/neu is a "self" tumor antigen that is overexpressed in 15-30% of human adenocarcinomas. Vaccine strategies directed against HER-2/neu and other self tumor antigens require development of methods to overcome immune tolerance to self-proteins. In rats, rat neu peptide vaccines have been shown to be an effective way of circumventing tolerance to rat neu protein and generating rat neu-specifi...

This review considers the stages of the development of synthetic peptide vaccines against infectious agents, novel approaches and technologies employed in this process, including bioinformatics, genomics, proteomics, large-scale peptide synthesis, high-throughput screening methods, the use of transgenic animals for modelling human infections. An important role for the development and selection ...

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...

Porcine epidemic diarrhea virus (PEDV), an enteric coronavirus, is the causative agent of porcine epidemic diarrhea (PED) that damages intestinal epithelial cells and results in severe diarrhea and dehydration in neonatal suckling pigs with up to 100% mortality. The oral vaccine route is reported as a promising approach for inducing protective immunity against PEDV invasion. Furthermore, dendri...

The need for an effective TB (tuberculosis) vaccine remains acute, with tuberculosis still one of the major killers worldwide and 3 million new infections annually. We report here on the immune responses elicited by HspCs (heat-shock protein-peptide complexes) isolated from BCG (Bacille Calmette-Guérin) vaccine. These HspCs elicit both the appropriate cellular and protective immune responses re...

We made an H1N1 vaccine candidate from a virus library consisting of 144 ( = 16 HA×9 NA) non-pathogenic influenza A viruses and examined its protective effects against a pandemic (2009) H1N1 strain using immunologically naïve cynomolgus macaques to exclude preexisting immunity and to employ a preclinical study since preexisting immunity in humans previously vaccinated or infected with influenza...

Dendrimers are structurally well-defined, synthetic polymers with sizes and physicochemical properties often resembling those of biomacromolecules (e.g., proteins). As a result, they are promising candidates for peptide-based vaccine delivery platforms. Herein, we established a synthetic pathway to conjugate a human papillomavirus (HPV) E7 protein-derived peptide antigen to a star-polymer to cr...