Infectious Disease

Laser light at a specific setting can activate antigen presenting cells in the skin and temporarily make cellular membranes permeable. Mei X. Wu and colleagues at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School in the U.S. will test whether injection of a vaccine into laser-exposed skin can significantly enhance immune responses stimulated by the vaccine.

BK virus is a very common and non-pathogenic virus that persists in specific organs for long periods of time. Simon Lacey of Beckman Research Institute of the City of Hope in the U.S. proposes using an engineered BK virus as a vaccine vector to introduce HIV polyepitope sequences in hopes of inducing a strong and long- lasting immune response against HIV.

In organisms that have extreme mutation rates, such as RNA viruses, quasispecies are highly diverse genotypes that may drastically differ from the general population and often become less viable as they continue to mutate. Using new deep sequencing technology, Marco Vignuzzi of the Pasteur Institute in France hopes to identify such RNA viruses that have managed to retain attenuated strains in order to study these genotypes for possible use in the development of viral vaccines.

Chen Yangchao of the Chinese University of Hong Kong proposes developing a lentiviral vector that targets the entry and replication of influenza viruses in domestic chickens. The team plans to test the ability of these modified chickens to be resistant to various influenza viruses in an effort to reduce the frequency of flu epidemics in poultry and, ultimately, in humans.

Because Leishmania is transmitted to humans when sand flies feed on humans, Jesus Valenzuela of the National Institutes of Health in the U.S. proposes to develop a novel vaccine against salivary proteins of sand flies with the aim to induce a strong immune response against the parasite.

The neurotransmitter octopamine is unique to the invertebrate nervous system and plays a crucial role in invertebrate behavior and fertility. Mark Alkema of the University of Massachusetts in the U.S. will attempt to design drugs to disrupt the biosynthesis of octopamine as a new strategy to interfere with the lifecycle of invertebrate parasites.

In an effort to develop a low cost and easily transportable therapeutic, Eric Lam of Rutgers, State University of New Jersey in the U.S. will develop transgenic tomatoes that express RNAs that targets several relevant viruses. The team will test whether these antiviral RNAs can accumulate in mammals after their ingestion to suppress viral proliferation.

To better understand the role that antimicrobial peptides play in the immune system, Gregory Tew of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the U.S. will test synthetic molecules that mimic these peptides for their ability to clear bacteria by engaging the innate and adaptive immune system.

Heimo Riedel of the West Virginia University School of Medicine in the U.S. will apply zinc finger nucleases as molecular scissors to directly disrupt the genome of human papilloma virus (HPV), the causal agent of cervical cancer. Once validated, this approach could also be applied to fight other infectious diseases including malaria, pneumonia, and tuberculosis.

Brendan Wren of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine in the UK will test a new bacterial synthesis method, Protein Glycan Coupling Technology. This method uses bacteria to attach proteins to glycans to produce glycoconjugate vaccines, and it could lead to an improved vaccine against pneumococcal disease. This project's Phase I research demonstrated that a Streptococcus pneumoniae capsular polysaccharide could be transferred to a carrier protein in E. coli.