Currently available prophylactic vaccines have no therapeutic efficacy for preexisting human papillomavirus (HPVs) infections, do not target all oncogenic HPVs and are insufficient to eliminate the burden of HPV induced cancer. We aim to develop an alternative HPV vaccine which is broadly effective and capable of clearing preexisting infection. In an initial attempt to develop a broadly reactiv...

Currently, there is no effective vaccine to prevent hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection, partly due to our insufficient understanding of the virus glycoprotein immunology. Most neutralizing antibodies (nAbs) were identified using glycoprotein immunogens, such as recombinant E1E2, HCV pseudoparticles or cell culture derived HCV. However, the fact that in the HCV acute infection phase, only a small...

Hepatitis C virus glycoprotein E2 contains 18 conserved cysteines predicted to form nine disulfide pairs. In this study, a comprehensive cysteine-alanine mutagenesis scan of all 18 cysteine residues was performed in E1E2-pseudotyped retroviruses (HCVpp) and recombinant E2 receptor-binding domain (E2 residues 384 to 661 [E2(661)]). All 18 cysteine residues were absolutely required for HCVpp entr...

infection with hepatitis c virus (hcv) is a worldwide problem. among hcv proteins, core antigen (ag), besides its importance for diagnostic application is a prime candidate for component of a vaccine. herein, we report results of studies on production of the hydrophilic domain of core ag (2-122) in native conformation by an arabinose induction system in e.coli and the primary characterization o...

The humoral response to hepatitis C virus (HCV) may contribute to controlling infection. We previously isolated human monoclonal antibodies to conformational epitopes on the HCV E2 glycoprotein. Here, we report on their ability to inhibit infection by retroviral pseudoparticles incorporating a panel of full-length E1E2 clones representing the full spectrum of genotypes 1-6. We identified one an...

Understanding how the genomes of viruses mutate and evolve within infected individuals is critically important in epidemiology. By exploiting knowledge of the forces that guide viral microevolution, researchers can design drugs and treatments that are effective against newly evolved strains. Therefore, it is critical to develop a method for typing the genomes of all of the variants of a virus (...

introduction: hepatitis c virus (hcv) is the major cause of acute and chronic hepatitis, cirrhosis, and hepatocellular carcinoma worldwide. because of increasing number of infected patients throughout the world, various studies are concentrated on development of high quality diagnostic tests and genotyping in various regions of the world. methods: in this study, we used rt-pcr to isolate and a...