A prophylactic vaccine to prevent the congenital transmission of human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) in newborns and to reduce life-threatening disease in immunosuppressed recipients of HCMV-infected solid organ transplants is highly desirable. Neutralizing antibodies against HCMV confer significant protection against infection, and glycoprotein B (gB) is a major target of such neutralizing antibodies...

As part of an effort to engineer ricin antitoxins and immunotherapies, we previously produced and characterized a collection of phage-displayed, heavy chain-only antibodies (VHHs) from alpacas that had been immunized with ricin antigens. In our initial screens, we identified nine VHHs directed against ricin toxin's binding subunit (RTB), but only one, JIZ-B7, had toxin-neutralizing activity. Li...

It was performed the comparison of the intensity and duration of agglutinating and neutralizing antibodies to serovar Hardjo in swines vaccinated with two commercial anti-leptospira bacterins. Sows no reactive to 24 Leptospira sp serovars in the microscopic agglutination test (MAT) were divided in three groups: Group A (n=08): received two vaccine A doses with 30 days interval, Group B (n=08) t...

Kaposi sarcoma-associated herpesvirus (KSHV) is the etiologic agent for Kaposi Sarcoma (KS), the most common cancer diagnosed in HIV- infected patients. The role of neutralizing antibodies in KS pathogenesis and in KSHV infected individuals is not clearly understood. The goal of this study was to investigate and compare the prevalence and titers of neutralizing antibodies in plasma samples from...

Two distinct IL-18 neutralizing strategies, i.e. a rabbit polyclonal anti-mouse IL-18 IgG and a recombinant human IL-18 binding protein (rhIL-18BP), were used to treat collagen-induced-arthritic DBA/1 mice after clinical onset of disease. The therapeutic efficacy of neutralizing endogenous IL-18 was assessed using different pathological parameters of disease progression. The clinical severity i...

The antibody isotype IgM appears earlier than IgG, within days of onset of symptoms, and is important during the early stages of the adaptive immune response. Little is known about the functional role of IgM during infection with chikungunya virus (CHIKV), a recently reemerging arbovirus that has caused large global outbreaks. In this study, we studied antibody responses in 102 serum samples co...

Broadly cross neutralizing antibodies (NAbs) are generated in a group of HIV-1 infected individuals during the natural infection, but little is known about their prevalence in patients infected with viral subtypes from different geographical regions. We tested here the neutralizing efficiency of plasma antibodies from 80 HIV-1 infected antiretroviral drug naive patients against a panel of subty...

Infectious bursal disease virus (IBDV) infects young chickens and causes serious lose to the poultry industry, worldwide. Previous attempts using purified bacterially expressed IBDV VP2 failed to elicit a protective immune response to the virus. This study was designed to investigate if the initial expressed protein contained neutralizing epitopes but became nonfunctional during purification st...

Dengue viruses (DENVs) are mosquito-borne flaviviruses that infect humans. The clinical presentation of DENV infection ranges from inapparent infection to dengue hemorrhagic fever and dengue shock syndrome. We analyzed samples from a pediatric dengue cohort study in Sri Lanka to explore whether antibody responses differentiated clinically apparent infections from clinically inapparent infection...

The mechanisms by which neutralizing antibodies inhibit Marburg virus (MARV) are not known. We isolated a panel of neutralizing antibodies from a human MARV survivor that bind to MARV glycoprotein (GP) and compete for binding to a single major antigenic site. Remarkably, several of the antibodies also bind to Ebola virus (EBOV) GP. Single-particle EM structures of antibody-GP complexes reveal t...