Difference between revisions of "Team:CGU Taiwan"

Abstract

For many infectious diseases that still don’t have an effective vaccine, enhancing T cell immune response may be the key point to solve this problem. Leijuvant represents a whole new perspective of adjuvant that uses Leishmania as an effective T cell stimulator. Leishmania is a parasite that specifically lives within macrophage, a professional antigen presenting cell (APC). As a potential vaccine adjuvant, Leishmania possess many advantages, including APC recruitment, pattern recognition receptor (PRR) activation, inflammasome activation, activation of MHC-presenting pathway and most important of all, T cell activation. Genetically-engineered Leishmania that can be inactivated by light exposure acts as a safe carrier to deliver specific antigens to APCs for activation of T cells and B cell stimulation. Based on this concept, we established a new model system to generate antigen-specific Leishmania adjuvant-- Leijuvant. We further designed a user-friendly MHC peptide prediction software to integrate key protein information and optimize the presentation of antigen peptides by MHC molecules. Our ultimate goal is to introduce Leijuvant as an effective, safe, and antigen-specific adjuvant to the vaccine industry and the general public.