Improved vaccines capable of promoting long-term cellular immunity are urgently required for a number of diseases that remain global health problems. In the present study, we demonstrate that a tuberculosis subunit vaccine, Ag85B-ESAT-6/CAF01 (where ESAT-6 is early secreted antigenic target of 6 kDa and CAF01 is cationic adjuvant formulation 01), induces very robust memory CD4 T cell responses ...

Reactivities of human sera against selected recombinant Mycobacterium tuberculosis antigens were assessed by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. The results obtained indicate that patients with tuberculosis (TB) do not develop a strong humoral response against PE_PGRS and PPE proteins or against the Ag85B and heparin-binding hemagglutinin (HBHA) recombinant antigens. Conversely, purified methyla...

There is a need to develop protective vaccines against tuberculosis (TB) that elicit full immune responses including mucosal immunity. Here, a live attenuated Salmonellatyphimurium aroA SL7207 vector TB vaccine, namely SL(E6-85B), harboring the Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M. tb) H37Rv ESAT6-Ag85B fusion gene was developed. The experimental data demonstrated that this SL(E6-85B) vaccine, or when...

Background: BCG protection is suboptimal and there is significant interest to develop new tuberculosis (TB) vaccines. However, there are significant limitations of the current vaccine evaluation systems in the mouse model. Here, we developed a BCG-challenge rabbit skin model as a new way to evaluate the protective efficacy of selected TB subunit vaccine candidates. Methods: Rabbits were immuniz...

We present COBS — a model of a concurrent object-based computational system with handshakes as elementary actions of inter-process communication. Processes are considered to be partial views of the system. Their communication by asynchronous message passing and variable sharing is modeled by elementary processes on the same abstraction level. The same acts of computation and communication can b...

BACKGROUND In the search for more potent and safer tuberculosis vaccines, CAF01 was identified as a remarkable formulation. Based on cationic liposomes and including a synthetic mycobacterial glycolipid as TLR-independent immunomodulator, it induces strong and protective T helper-1 and T helper-17 adult murine responses to Ag85B-ESAT-6, a major mycobacterial fusion protein. Here, we assessed wh...

Mycobacterium tuberculosis cell wall glycolipid, lipoarabinomannan, can inhibit CD4(+) T cell activation by downregulating the phosphorylation of key proximal TCR signaling molecules: Lck, CD3ζ, ZAP70, and LAT. Inhibition of proximal TCR signaling can result in T cell anergy, in which T cells are inactivated following an Ag encounter, yet remain viable and hyporesponsive. We tested whether mann...