ChBE Fall 2018 Seminar“Nanovaccines in Sickness and in Health”

Armour College of Engineering's and Chemical and Biological Engineering Department will host a seminar featuring professor of Microbiology Department of Pathobiological Science, University of Wisconsin,

Professor Adel Talaat. He will present his lecture, “Nanovaccines in Sickness and in Health”

Abstract:

The economic success of animal production worldwide hinges on extensive use of vaccines to control bacterial and viral infections. Most of the current antibiotics are not used in food animals to curb the problem of spreading drug-resistant pathogens and anti-viral agents are expensive to use in animals. In humans, several challenges still exist to immunize against devastating diseases such as tuberculosis and malaria. Despite vaccines are available to combat many of the important pathogens that impact animal and human health, most of these vaccines do not provide sufficient immunity against emerging infections and might not be stable under field conditions. Recently, we adopted several platform technologies to develop nanovaccines against key infections using suitable animal models that can be easily adopted to human infections. We tested these technologies using bacterial (Johne’s disease) and viral (avian influenza) diseases in comparison to traditional vaccines. To start, we examined the fate of vaccines prepared by polyanhydride nanoparticles (PAN) in mice and chicken which resulted in no untoward effects on animals, confirming the safety of PAN. We also deciphered the immunogenicity and protective immunity of key antigens encapsulated within PANs in standard immunization and challenge models for testing vaccine efficacy. Immunological assays demonstrated a substantial increase in the levels of antigen-specific T cell responses post-vaccination in the PAN-vaccinated groups as indicated by high percentages of triple cytokine (IFN-γ, IL-2, TNF-α) producing CD8+ T cells, a key marker for successful vaccination against Johne’s disease. More importantly, when animals were immunized with PAN-based vaccines, superior protection as indicated by lower tissue pathogen loads were elicited for both Johne’s disease and avian influenza models, confirming the preventative nature of our vaccine constructs. Currently, we are trying to examine the utility of nanovaccines as therapeutic vaccines for human vaccination to overcome problems associated with traditional vaccine using the tuberculosis model of infection.