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Book
Influenza Virus Vaccines and Immunotherapies
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Year: 2016 Publisher: Frontiers Media SA

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Abstract

Influenza virus infections lead to thousands of deaths worldwide annually and billions of dollars economic burden. Despite continuing advances in our understanding of the immune evasion mechanism, the disease remains one of the foremost threat for human being. Traditional vaccines (attenuated and inactivated) mainly provide protection by inducing virus neutralizing antibodies, targeting ever changing surface antigens: Haemagultinin (HA) and Neuraminidase (NA). Due to genetic shift and immune selection pressure, prevalence of circulating influenza virus subtypes changes every year. Therefore, mismatch between circulating strain and vaccine strain can critically affect the success rate of these conventional flu vaccines, and requires continuous monitoring of circulating influenza virus subtypes and change in the vaccine formulations accordingly. The collective limitations of existing flu vaccines urgently call for the development of a novel universal vaccines that might provide the required protective immunity to a range of influenza virus subtypes. New approaches are being investigated mainly targeting conserved regions of flu proteins. Some of these approaches include universally conserved epitopes of HA, nucleoprotein (NP), capsid protein (M1) and ion channel protein (M2) that induced strong immune responses in animal models. Some attention and progress appears to be focused on vaccines based on the M2 ectodomain (M2e) employing a variety of constructs, adjuvants and delivery systems, including M2e-hepatitis B core antigen, flagellin constructs, and virus-like particles (VLP). Animal studies with these M2e candidate vaccines demonstrated that these vaccine candidates can prevent severe illness and death but not infection, which may pose difficulties in both the evaluation of clinical efficacy and approval by the regulatory authorities. VLP vaccines appear to be promising, but still are mostly limited to animal studies. The discovery and development of new and improved vaccines have been greatly facilitated by the application of new technologies. The use of nucleic acid-based vaccines, to combine the benefits of in-situ expression of antigens with the safety of inactivated and subunit vaccines, has been a key advancement. Upon their discovery more than 20 years ago, nucleic acid vaccines promised to be a safe and effective mean to mimic immunization with a live organism vaccine, particularly for induction of T cell immunity. In addition, the manufacturing of nucleic acid-based vaccines offered the potential to be relatively simple, inexpensive and generic. Reverse Vaccinology and in-silico designing of vaccines are very innovative approaches and being considered as future of vaccines. Furthermore, various immuno-therapeutic agents also being developed to treat and minimize immuno-pathological damage in patients suffering from life threatening complications. For the treatment of such pathological conditions, various novel approaches such as administration of immune suppressive cytokines, blocking co-stimulatory signals or activating co-inhibitory signal of T cell activation, are being tested both in lab and clinics. The Research Topic on influenza virus vaccine and therapeutics will give an insight in to the current status and future scope of these new innovative approaches and technologies. Moreover, these new methods will also serve as a reference tool for the development of future vaccines against several other pathogens.


Book
Immunization : Vaccine Adjuvant Delivery System and Strategies
Authors: --- ---
ISBN: 1789845394 1789845386 1838817832 Year: 2018 Publisher: IntechOpen

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Abstract

Immunization plays a key role in maintaining human health and each year, saves millions of lives from lethal pathogens and other fatal diseases in the most economical way, thanks to the advanced development of model vaccines. Subunit vaccines are regarded as a safer product than the whole microbe based-conventional vaccines and can be entrapped in various nanocarriers to form a vaccine adjuvant-delivery system (VADS) able to further boost their immunostimulatory activity. In this book, six groups of authors introduce immunization advances in VADSs designed for infection prophylaxis and cancer immunotherapy, problems and their resolution in both human and poultry immunization, and also, the mathematical model for assay of the basic immunization problem (BIP) understood from a finance point of view.


Book
Immunomodulatory Effects of Drugs for Treatment of Immune-Related Diseases
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Year: 2017 Publisher: Frontiers Media SA

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More than 90% of diseases possess immunological abnormalities. Disorders such as inflammation, hypersensitivity, autoimmunity and immunodeficiency are simple examples of how the immune system misinterprets its surroundings and goes awry. Multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus, inflammatory bowel diseases, among many others are manifestations of immune cells attacking normal tissues. On the other hand, damping the immune system leads to diseases such as cancer, AIDS, and severe combined immunodeficiency. The last ten years witnessed an explosion in developing drugs that target the immune system. Several novel monoclonal antibodies have been approved for treatment of various diseases confirming that personalized medicine approach is robust in combating diseases. Hence, the future holds great promise for using personalized and targeted medicine rather than generalized medications that, in most circumstances, proven to be ineffective and characteristically exert side effects. Approaches such as generating novel adjuvants that can stimulate the immune system without harmful side effects, targeting inflammatory cytokines and chemokines, harnessing and activating innate immune cells such as natural killer cells or dendritic cells, are examples of future approaches to treat autoimmune diseases, AIDS, and various forms of cancer resulting from chronic inflammation. More recently, targeting immune checkpoint molecules have shown therapeutic response against lung cancer and melanoma. Identifying molecules involved in autophagy is another example of how personalized medicine might help treat patients with refractory asthma and autoimmune diseases. This topic introduces the reader to these novel approaches of manipulating the immune system and developing targeted therapeutic strategies for treatment of various diseases.


Book
Paradigm changes are required in HIV vaccine research
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Year: 2015 Publisher: Frontiers Media SA

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Abstract

In his 1962 book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", Thomas Kuhn famously argued that researchers in every field of scientific enquiry always operate under a set of presuppositions known as paradigms that are rarely explicitly stated. In the field of HIV vaccine research, several prevailing paradigms led scientists for many years to pursue unfruitful lines of investigations that impeded significant progress. The uncritical acceptance of reigning paradigms makes scientists reluctant to abandon their mistaken assumptions even when they obtain results that are not consistent with the paradigms. The following five paradigms which disregard the degeneracy of the immune system were particularly harmful. 1) There is a primary and intrinsic epitope specific for each B cell receptor and for the corresponding monoclonal antibody. In reality, there is no single, intrinsic or "real" epitope for any antibody but only a diverse group of potential ligands. 2) Reactions with monoclonal antibodies are more specific than the combined reactivity of polyclonal antibodies. In reality, a polyclonal antiserum has greater specificity for a multiepitopic protein because different antibodies in the antiserum recognize separate epitopes on the same protein, giving rise to an additive specificity effect. By focusing vaccine design on single epitope-Mab pairs, the beneficial neutralizing synergy that occurs with polyclonal antibody responses is overlooked. 3) The HIV epitope identified by solving the crystallographic structure of a broadly neutralizing Mab – HIV Env complex should be able, when used as immunogen, to elicit antibodies endowed with the same neutralizing capacity as the Mab. Since every anti HIV bnMab is polyspecific, the single epitope identified in the complex is not necessarily the one that elicited the bnMab. Since hypermutated Mabs used in crystallographic studies differ from their germline-like receptor version present before somatic hypermutation, the identified epitope will not be an effective vaccine immunogen. 4) Effective vaccine immunogenicity can be predicted from the antigenic binding capacity of viral epitopes. Most fragments of a viral antigen can induce antibodies that react with the immunogen, but this is irrelevant for vaccination since these antibodies rarely recognize the cognate, intact antigen and even more rarely neutralize the infectivity of the viral pathogen that harbors the antigen. 5) The rational design of vaccine immunogens using reverse vaccinology is superior to the trial-and-error screening of vaccine candidates able to induce protective immunity. One epitope can be designed to increase its structural complementarity to one particular bnMab, but such antigen design is only masquerading as immunogen design because it is assumed that antigenic reactivity necessarily entails the immunogenic capacity to elicit neutralizing antibodies. When HIV Env epitopes, engineered to react with a bnMab are used to select from human donors rare memory B cells secreting bnAbs, this represents antigen design and not immunogen design. The aim of this Research Topic is to replace previous misleading paradigms by novel ones that better fit our current understanding of immunological specificity and will help HIV vaccine development.


Book
Breaking the cycle : attacking the malaria parasite in the liver
Authors: --- ---
Year: 2015 Publisher: Frontiers Media SA

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Abstract

Despite significant progress in the global fight against malaria, this parasitic infection is still responsible for nearly 300 million clinical cases and more than half a million deaths each year, predominantly in African children less than 5 years of age. The infection starts when mosquitoes transmit small numbers of parasites into the skin. From here, the parasites travel with the bloodstream to the liver where they undergo an initial round of replication and maturation to the next developmental stage that infects red blood cells. A vaccine capable of blocking the clinically silent liver phase of the Plasmodium life cycle would prevent the subsequent symptomatic phase of this tropical disease, including its frequently fatal manifestations such as severe anemia, acute lung injury, and cerebral malaria. Parasitologists, immunologists, and vaccinologists have come to appreciate the complexity of the adaptive immune response against the liver stages of this deadly parasite. Lymphocytes play a central role in the elimination of Plasmodium infected hepatocytes, both in humans and animal models, but our understanding of the exact cellular interactions and molecular effector mechanisms that lead to parasite killing within the complex hepatic microenvironment of an immune host is still rudimentary. Nevertheless, recent collaborative efforts have led to promising vaccine approaches based on liver stages that have conferred sterile immunity in humans – the University of Oxford's Ad prime / MVA boost vaccine, the Naval Medical Research Center’s DNA prime / Ad boost vaccine, Sanaria, Inc.'s radiation-attenuated whole sporozoite vaccine, and Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre’s chemoprophylaxis with sporozoites vaccine. The aim of this Research Topic is to bring together researchers with expertise in malariology, immunology, hepatology, antigen discovery and vaccine development to provide a better understanding of the basic biology of Plasmodium in the liver and the host’s innate and adaptive immune responses. Understanding the conditions required to generate complete protection in a vaccinated individual will bring us closer to our ultimate goal, namely to develop a safe, scalable, and affordable malaria vaccine capable of inducing sustained high-level protective immunity in the large proportion of the world’s population constantly at risk of malaria.


Book
Antifungal and Antiparasitic Drug Delivery
Authors: --- ---
Year: 2020 Publisher: Basel, Switzerland MDPI - Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute


Book
Recent Advances in Cereals, Legumes and Oilseeds Grain Products Rheology and Quality
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Year: 2022 Publisher: Basel MDPI - Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute

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The Special Issue presents information on the progress made in recent years in cereals’, legumes’, and oilseed grain products’ rheology and quality. This Special Issue capitalizes the experience of authors in grain processing for obtaining food products qualitatively improved based on the quality of raw materials used and applied technologies or intended for special nutrition, such as gluten-free one or with low sodium content. This Special Issue also presents some issues related to byproduct valorization through circular economy approaches obtained from the processing of different cereals and oilseeds grains and new methods for rapid assessment of bread quality.


Book
Advances in DNA Vaccines
Authors: ---
Year: 2021 Publisher: Basel, Switzerland MDPI - Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute

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DNA is a rapidly developing vaccine platform for cancer and infectious and non-infectious diseases. Plasmids are used as immunogens to encode proteins to be further synthesized in vaccine recipients. DNA is mainly synthetic, ensuring enhanced expression in the cells of vaccine recipients (mostly mammalians). Their introduction into the host induces antibody and cellular responses. The latter are often more pronounced, and mimic the events occurring in infection, especially viral. There are a few distinct ways in which the vaccine antigen can be processed and presented, which determine the resulting immune response and which can be manipulated. Routinely, the antigen synthesized within the host cell is processed by proteasome, loaded onto, and presented in a complex with MHC I molecules. Processing can be re-routed to the lysosome, or immunogen can be secreted for further presentation in a complex with MHC II. Apart from expression, vaccination efficacy depends on DNA delivery. DNA immunogens are generally administered by intramuscular or intradermal injections, usually followed by electroporation, which enhances delivery 1000-fold. Other techniques are also used, such as noninvasive introduction by biojectors, skin applications with plasters and microneedles/chips, sonication, magnetofection, and even tattooing. An intense debate regarding the pros and cons of different routes of delivery is ongoing. A number of studies have compared the effect of delivery methods at the level of immunogen expression, and the magnitude and specificity of the resulting immune response. According to some, the delivery route determines immunogenic performance; according to others, it can modulate the level of response, but not its specificity or polarity. The progress of research aiming at the optimization of DNA vaccine design, delivery, and immunogenic performance has led to a marked increase in their efficacy in large species and humans. New DNA vaccines for use in the treatment of infectious diseases, cancer, allergies, and autoimmunity are forthcoming. This Special Issue covers various aspects of DNA vaccine development.

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