Scientists design fast-track for vaccine development.
A team of Washington State University scientists has devised a protein-screening method that could lead to development of vaccines against some of the world’s most troubling infectious diseases.
The new method allows researchers to rapidly screen large numbers of pathogen proteins, called antigens, for their ability to prompt immune responses in hosts. Proteins with this ability are good candidates for use in vaccines.
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Potential for fighting malaria
The WSU team’s work will be especially valuable in the quest for vaccines against persistent diseases, such as malaria, sleeping sickness, and syphilis.
“It’s very slick,” says immunologist Wendy Brown, who led the research effort. “Now we have a high-throughput way of finding antigens from any pathogen, as long as you have the genome sequence. To me this was a huge breakthrough because I’ve been spending my whole career trying to figure out ways to do this.”
WSU team collaborated with NIH researchers
The research team includes scientists at WSU and at the Rocky Mountain Laboratories of the National Institutes of Health. Their paper was published in the March 20 issue of the Journal of Immunological Methods.
Dr. Brown, a professor in the WSU College of Veterinary Medicine Department of Veterinary Microbiology and Pathology, says the new technique also will be a boon to researchers working on vaccines against pathogens that are highly contagious or especially deadly, such as the Ebola virus and the bacterium that causes anthrax.
Technique can be applied to bioterrorism threats
She uses it to screen proteins from Coxiella, a bacterium that causes Q fever and is considered a possible bioterrorism threat.
“If you have the genome, you don’t have to touch the organism. You can just start expressing all these proteins and test them,” she notes.
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