Backgrounds: Most of the hepatitis C virus (HCV) infections elicit poor immune responses and 75% to 85% of cases become chronic therefore, the development of an effective vaccine against HCV is of paramount importance. In this study, we aimed to evaluate co-administration of HCV non-Structural Protein 2 and IL-12 DNA vaccines in C57BL/6 mice. Methods: A plasmid encoding full-length HCV NS2 prot...

Chikungunya virus has become a global health threat, spreading to the industrial world of Europe and the Americas; no treatment or prophylactic vaccine is available. Since the late 1960s much effort has been put into the development of a vaccine, and several heterogeneous strategies have already been explored. Only two candidates have recently qualified to enter clinical phase II trials, a chik...

conclusions hcv gpe2 is an ideal target for hcv vaccine. prediction of epitope immunogenicity and characterization on the basis of peptide sequences will be significantly helpful for development of a heterologous vaccine against hcv variants. results many b-cell and t-cell epitopes predicted in gpe2 were found conserved among hcv 3a genotypes whereas few were conserved in other genotypes antici...

The global health community is beginning to gain an understanding of the global burden of norovirus-associated disease, which appears to have significant burden in both developed- and developing-country populations. Of particular importance is the growing recognition of norovirus as a leading cause of gastroenteritis and diarrhea in countries where rotavirus vaccine has been introduced. While n...

New information on the crystal structures of the HIV and the simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) envelopes represented one of the scientific highlights of the 12th Annual Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections. Numerous presentations also underscored the increasing recognition of the central role of gut-associated lymphoid tissue in AIDS pathogenesis and helped reveal a better ...

Tuberculosis remains a major public health problem around the world. Because the Mycobacterium bovis Bacilli-Calmette-Guerin (BCG) vaccine fails to protect adults from pulmonary tuberculosis, there is an urgent need for improved vaccine formulations. Unlike BCG, recombinant vaccines purified from bacterial expression vectors, as well as naked DNA, require an additional adjuvant. Recent improvem...

Vaccines represent one of the most cost-effective ways to prevent and treat diseases. The use of vaccines in the control of viral diseases represents an important milestone in the history of medicine. The genomic revolution brought us the possibility to scan genomes in the search of new and more effective vaccine candidates and the advancement of bioinformatics provided the framework for the ap...

Treating cancer with vaccines has been a challenging field of investigation since the 1950s. Over the years, the lack of effective active immunotherapies has led to the development of numerous novel strategies. However, the use of therapeutic cancer vaccines may be on the verge of becoming an effective modality. Recent phase II/III clinical trials have achieved hopeful results in terms of overa...

Recent advances in HIV vaccine development include initiation of the first efficacy trials and substantial expansion of the preclinical pipeline. Several preclinical candidate vaccines have induced strong cellular immune responses and provided impressive protection against AIDS in non-human primate models; however, candidates that induce broadly neutralizing antibodies remain elusive.