Vaccine Developers ‘Chlamp’ Down on Chlamydia

Chlamydia trachomatis are Gram-negative bacteria characterized by an intracellular development using the host’s own ATP to survive and proliferate. It is responsible for ocular, genital and respiratory infections and is the most common sexually transmitted disease of bacterial origin. C. trachomatis native antigens are direct targets for the immune system and could help in generating T cell and antibody responses. Using high-throughput proteomic screening, Dr. Jessica Baker Flechtner and her team from Genocea Biosciences and Harvard Medical School identified 13 antigens derived from C. trachomatis capable of inducing either CD4+ or CD8+ T cell responses in experimentally infected mice. Two of these antigens were assessed further as potential vaccine candidates. In combination with the adjuvant AbISCO-100, strong and long-lasting protections were seen against vaginal challenges in mice with the generation of protein-specific CD4+ Th1 and CD8+ cytotoxic T cell responses. The role of T cells was further emphasized by the efficiency of adoptive T cell transfer in achieving the same feat and the absence of a humoral response. Their findings, presented in the June 2012 issue of Vaccine, underlined the need to identify and characterize other potential antigenic candidates to accelerate development and release of a prophylactic and/or therapeutic C. trachomatis vaccine.

Enzo Life Sciences enables scientists to develop such vaccines against a variety of micro-organisms by offering a comprehensive list of antigens for use in ELISA/ELISPOT as positive controls, as well as toxins for cytotoxicity studies, some of which are described below:

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