A safe and effective Hantaan virus (HTNV) vaccine is highly desirable because HTNV causes an acute and often fatal disease (hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome, HFRS). Since the immunity of the inactivated vaccine is weak and the safety is poor, HTNV virus-like particles (VLPs) offer an attractive and safe alternative. These particles lack the viral genome but are perceived by the immune syst...

Protein nanoparticles such as virus-like particles (VLPs) can be obtained by recombinant protein production of viral capsid proteins and spontaneous self-assembling in cell factories. Contrarily to infective viral particles, VLPs lack infective viral genome while retaining important viral properties like cellular tropism and intracellular delivery of internalized molecules. These properties mak...

Advances in nanotechnology and nanomaterials have facilitated the development of silicon dioxide, or Silica, particles as a promising immunological adjuvant for the generation of novel prophylactic and therapeutic vaccines. In the present study, we have compared the adjuvanting potential of commercially available Silica nanoparticles (initial particles size of 10-20 nm) with that of aluminium h...

Despite intensive research over the last three decades, it has not yet been possible to bring an effective vaccine against human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and resulting acquired syndrome (AIDS) market. Virus-like particles (VLP) are a promising approach for efficient vaccination could play important role in fight HIV. For example, HEK293 (human embryo kidney) cells can be used produce virus-...

Recently, it has been shown that HCV core proteins (HCcAg) with C-terminal deletions assemble in vitro into virus-like particles (VLPs) in the presence of structured RNA molecules. Results presented in this work showed that a truncated HCcAg variant covering the first 120 aa (HCcAg.120) with a 32 aa N-terminal fusion peptide (6xHistag-Xpressepitope) interacts with plasmid DNA vaccine. Interesti...

2015 Vaccination has been the most effective and economical way of combating the spread of infectious disease. Virus-like particles (VLPs) against human and animal diseases caused by picornaviruses are actively being researched and developed as potential vaccines. Promising immunogenicity and protective efficacy data has been reported for VLPs produced using various expression systems. The tran...

We established a plasmid-based system for generating infectious Ebola virus-like particles (VLPs), which contain an Ebola virus-like minigenome consisting of a negative-sense copy of the green fluorescent protein gene. This system produced nearly 10(3) infectious particles per ml of supernatant, equivalent to the titer of Ebola virus generated by a reverse genetics system. Interestingly, infect...

We used a baculovirus expression system to express fusion proteins of HCV core, RGD (Arg-Gly-Asp) peptide, and IFN-α2a fragments in Sf9 cells. Western blotting and electron microscopy demonstrate that HCV core, peptides RGD, and IFN-α2a fusion proteins assemble into 30 to 40 nm nano-particles (virus-like particles, VLPs). Xenograft assays show that VLPs greatly reduced tumor volume and weight w...

The virus-like particles (VLPs) produced by the yeast retrotransposon Ty1 are functionally related to retroviral cores. These particles are unusual in that they have variable radif. A paired mass-radius analysis of VLPs by scanning transmission electron microscopy showed that many of these particles form an icosahedral T-number series. Three-dimensional reconstruction to 38-A resolution from cr...