Enhancement of immunogenicity by increased retention of antigenic proteins to injection sites and multimerization

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Protection from infectious diseases by vaccines is the most cost effective measure to decrease the impact of**many bacterial and viral diseases. For vaccines their safety is the paramount importance. Thus, most new**vaccines for human use are developed as inactivated or component vaccines. The difficulty in the protein-based**component vaccines is their relatively weak immunological stimulation. To overcome this problem various**adjuvants that potentially enhance the antigenic stimulation are tested. iProgen has developed new technologies**that enhance the retention of proteins to animal tissues and multimerize proteins with minimal modification.**We thought the increased retention and multimerization of antigenic molecules might help enhance the**immune stimulation through the similar mechanism as some of the commonly used adjuvant.**The proposed study is to test if such modifications of an antigenic protein may help enhance the immune**stimulation in animal models. We are testing the potentials in both systemic and mucosal stimulations. We will**use Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP) as the test antigenic protein. GFP is modified to stay in the injected site**by the new technology developed by iProgen. In the first experiment the modified and unmodified GFPs will**be inoculated to mice intramuscularly and the development of specific antibody to GFP is monitored. Whether**conventional alum adjuvant co-operatively works or not will also be investigated. In the second experiment the**modified and unmodified GFP will be applied to nasal mucosal surface in the presence or absence of a mucosal**adjuvant, FSL-1. The induction of specific antibodies on the mucosal surface will be monitored in feces and**nasal wash of the inoculated mice. If successful, this technology would be further tested whether modified viral**proteins can induce protective immunity to viral diseases in animal models. Ultimately, we are hoping this**technology will help develop new safer, more efficacious and less expensive vaccines for various infectious**diseases.