DNA Vaccines: Safety and Regulatory Issues

Dennis M. Klinman and Herbert A. Smith

Plans to initiate clinical trials involving DNA vaccines prompted the US Food and Drug Administration to examine the safety of this form of vaccination. Concerns were raised that DNA vaccines might possibly:

integrate into the host genome, thereby increasing th...

Escherichia coli Vaccines

Myron M. Levine and Michael S. Donnenberg

Escherichia coli is a component of the normal intestinal flora where it performs physiological functions. However, in immunocompromised hosts or in normal hosts whose anatomical barriers have been disrupted (as by trauma), E. coli can cause invasive septicemic disease. Moreover, there exist subse...

Experimental Vaccine Strategies for Cancer Immunotherapy

Stefanie L. Stevenson and T.C. Wu

The ideal cancer therapy for advanced cervical cancers should have the potency to eradicate systemic tumor in multiple sites in the body, as well as the specificity to discriminate between neoplastic and nonneoplastic cells. In both of these respects, immunotherapy is an attractive approach. The i...

Genetic Immunization Against HIV

Britta Wahren, Karl Ljungberg, Anne Kjerrstrˆm Zuber and Bartek Zuber

The HIV virus and its subtypes are spread worldwide. AIDS has become the worldís most threatening infectious disease. The picture of the epidemic has changed: several subtypes and recombinants of subtypes are becoming frequent in all countries. Treatment with sophisticated drugs impr...

Genomics and Proteomics in Vaccine Design

John L. Telford, Mariagrazia Pizza, Guido Grandi and Rino Rappuoli

In 1881, Louis Pasteur, the father of bacterial vaccines and immunology, demonstrated publicly the first vaccine against a bacterial infection. His vaccine, against anthrax in sheep, consisted of Bacillus anthracis attenuated by high-temperature growth in his laboratory. At Pouilly-Le-Fort, a sma...

Gp100 and G250: Towards Specific Immunotherapy Employing Dendritic Cells in Melanoma and Renal Cell Carcinoma

Joost L.M.Vissers, I. Jolanda M. de Vries, Egbert Oosterwijk, Carl G. Figdor and Gosse J. Adema

A long history of studies demonstrate the capacity of the immune system to develop specific reactivity against antigens foreign to the host, like viral and bacterial antigens. During the last decade it is becoming more and more apparent that an immune response can also be mounted against tumor-as...

Group A Streptococcus Vaccine Research: Historical Synopsis and New Insights

Sean D. Reid, Kimmo Virtaneva and James M. Musser

Streptococcus pyogenes, commonly referenced to as Lancefield group A Streptococcus (GAS), is a gram positive human pathogen that causes a variety of diseases including pharyngitis, scarlet fever, necrotizing fasciitis, and streptococcal toxic shock syndrome (STSS). Post-infectious sequelae such a...

Helicobacter pylori Vaccines

Gabriela Garcia and Jacques Pappo

Helicobacter pylori is a motile, Gram negative spiral organism with gastric trophism. Approximately half of the world’s population is infected with H. pylori, and the infection persists for life unless treated with antimicrobials and a proton-pump inhibitor. Commonly acquired during childhood, ...

HPV Vaccines for Protection Against Infection

Kathrin U. Jansen

The purpose of this chapter is to describe the rationale and scientific evidence for the development of prophylactic human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines based on the use of recombinant HPV virus-like particles. HPV-Associated Diseases Human papillomaviruses (HPVs) infect cutaneous, genital and r...

Identification and Selection of T-Cell Epitopes Derived from Tumor-Associated Antigens for the Development of Immunotherapy for Cancer

Esteban Celis

Because the immune system has the capacity to recognize and in many cases destroy tumor cells, significant efforts are being devoted to the development of immune-based therapies for cancer. Both cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTL) and helper T lymphocytes (HTL) have been shown to react with antigens ex...

Immune Responses in Gene Transfer for Genetic Disorders

Denise E. Sabatino and Katherine A. High

Gene transfer is a novel area of therapeutics in which a nucleic acid sequence is the active agent. Transferred in via a gene delivery vehicle, or vector, the donated gene sequence, referred to as a transgene, is usually introduced into a single target tissue in the host, where it dir...

Immune Responses to DNA Vaccines: Induction of CD8⁺

Jens A. Leifert and J. Lindsay Whitton

The importance of CD8⁺ T cells in the control and eradication of viruses has been demonstrated in mice and men. In the mouse, they are critical in combating infection with lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus (LCMV; ref. 1), and in humans, &qu...

Immunobiology of HPV Infection

Graham R. Leggatt and Ian H. Frazer

T of epithelial cells. An understanding of the viral life cycle, models of infection and the host immune response is an essential first step in the development of therapeutic or prophylactic vaccines. The literature suggests that strategies to elicit neutralizing anti-capsid protein antibodies wi...

Immunomodulation of HPV Infection and Disease: An Overview

Robert W. Tindle

About 50 of the approximately 100 (the number continues to grow) genotypes of human papillomaviruses (HPV) infect the mucous epithelium of the genital tract. HPV genotypes 6, 11, 43 and 44, in particular, predispose individuals to noninvasive flat or hyperkeratotic condylomata (genital warts) and...

In-Licensing Issues and Vaccine Technologies

Dale R. Spriggs

The pharmaceutical industry is undergoing profound changes as the advances in biotechnology give rise to new technologies and approaches to discovering and developing new products. Conventional combinatorial chemistry and high-throughput screening combined with functional genomics, ph...

Inactivated Virus Vaccines

Andrew D. Murdin, Benjamin Rovinski, Suryaprakash Sambhara

Inactivated virus vaccines have made a significant contribution to the control of infectious disease during the 20^th century and will surely remain an important feature of vaccination strategies in the 21^st century. Inactivated vaccines are currently widely avail...

Induction of B Cells by DNA Vaccines

K. Kilpatrick, M. Sarzotti and G. Kelsoe

Antigen first activates T and B lymphocytes in the T cell areas of secondary lymphoid tissues where cognate‑ and costimulus‑dependent proliferation expands the population of reactive lymphocytes. Selected T and B cell progeny from this population migrate into B cell zones to ...

Live Attenuated Bacterial Vaccines

Kevin P. Killeen and Victor J. DiRita

Immunization is the most effective public health tool used to control infectious disease. Moreover, it is extremely cost effective given that treatment of disease is far more expensive than disease prevention. The cost of vaccines and their administration from birth to age 16 is estim...

Live Attenuated Bacterial Vectors

Sims K. Kochi and Kevin P. Killeen

It is doubtful that Louis Pasteur could have anticipated the significance in 1881 that his discovery of bacterial attenuation would have on the use of microorganisms to protect against infectious diseases. Now, more than a century later, live attenuated bacterial vaccines have been de...

Live Recombinant Vaccine Vectors for HPV Antigens Associated with Infection and Malignancy

Abba C. Zubair, Yvonne Paterson and Elwyn Y. Loh

Classical vaccines for polio, small pox, and influenza use attenuated viruses to induce immunity in diseases where first time exposure normally elicits protective immunity against a second infection with the same or closely related agent. These vaccines are successful because the diseases in huma...

Live Vaccines

Alan R. Shaw

Live attenuated viral vaccines represent the most effective means of inducing a broad immune response against viruses that can be cultivated in vitro. These vaccines mimic a natural infection and thereby induce both cellular and humoral responses required for efficient defense ...

Live Viral Vectors

Elizabeth B. Kauffman, Michel Bublot, Russell R. Gettig, Keith J. Limbach, Steven E Pincus, and Jill Taylor

Live viral vector vaccines derived by the insertion of genes encoding sequences from disease organisms offer a number of advantages over live attenuated vaccines, inactivated vaccines, subunit or DNA approaches. The evolution of any successful vaccine must address issues such as safet...

Live, Attenuated Salmonella Vaccine Vectors

Sims K. Kochi and Kevin P. Killeen

There were few effective means available for preventing human infectious diseases prior to the beginning of the 19 th century, and millions of people succumbed to smallpo x, cholera, diphtheria, typhoid fever, and influenza. In the late 1700s, Edward Jenner conceived the notion to vaccinate human...

Lyme Disease Vaccine

Janine Evans and Erol Fikrig

Lyme disease occurs throughout the world. Most cases of Lyme borreliosis are reported from temperate regions and coincide with the distribution of the principal vector, ticks of the Ixodes ricinus complex, including I. ricinus, which is found in most of Europe; Ixodes persulcatus, which is found ...

Melanoma Peptide Clinical Trials

Ian D. Davis and Michael T. Lotze

Although various immunologic approaches to the treatment of cancer have been used for over a century,1 it is only relatively recent that specific human cancer targets have been defined allowing specific therapy against them. Burnet2 proposed a theory of immunosurveillance almost 30 years ago, pos...