A nonvirulent Salmonella dublin flagellin-negative, aromatic-dependent live vaccine strain has been used to express hepatitis B virus surface antigen epitopes in an immunogenic form. The envelope proteins of the virion are encoded by the S gene, which contains the pre-S1, pre-S2, and S coding regions. Synthetic oligonucleotides corresponding to amino acid residues S-(122-137) and pre-S2-(120-14...

The UK incidence of hepatitis B is falling. About 245 cases were reported per quarter in 1998-a marked decrease from just under 2000 reports in 1984. However, the prevalence remains high in other parts of the world and appreciably higher amongst healthcare workers. In Israel in 1994 the seroprevalence of anti-HBc was 10% in the general population but 24% in hospital employees; no significant ch...

Granulocyte macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF) has shown promise as an adjuvant to improve the kinetics and magnitude of the immune response after vaccination. It was hypothesized that GM-CSF given intramuscularly (IM) with hepatitis B vaccine would result in increased seroconversion rates and antibody titers. In total, 108 healthy volunteers (18-45 years old) received recombinant he...

BACKGROUND A potential link between the recombinant hepatitis B vaccine and an increased risk of multiple sclerosis (MS) has been evaluated in several studies, but some of them have substantial methodologic limitations. METHODS The authors conducted a nested case-control study within the General Practice Research Database (GPRD) in the United Kingdom. The authors identified patients who had a...

introduction: zinc deficiency causes abnormalities in immune response. in chronic hemodialysis (hd) and continuous ambulatory peritoneal dialysis (capd) patients, impaired immune responses to vaccination have been reported. therefore, we performed a study to determine the correlation between serum zinc levels and immune response to hepatitis b vaccination in patients on dialysis. methods: a cro...

the immune response to hepatitis b surface antigen (hbsag) is influenced by several factors, of which hla antigens and balanced secretion of th1/th2 cytokines play important roles. the aim of this study was to evaluate the influence of hla antigens on cytokine secretion by hbsag-stimulated peripheral blood mononuclear cells (pbmc) from healthy neonates vaccinated with recombinant hbsag. pbmcs w...

OBJECTIVES Data on the factors that contribute to the antibody response to hepatitis B virus vaccination in peritoneal dialysis patients are scarce. The current study was conducted on a group of peritoneal dialysis patients to learn how the response to hepatitis B virus vaccination varies according to the patient's clearance of urea normalized to total body water (Kt/V). METHODS A convenience...

CONTEXT The association between infant age at initiation of hepatitis B vaccination and completion of the 3-dose hepatitis B vaccination series is unclear. OBJECTIVE To assess the association between administration of the first dose of hepatitis B vaccine within 7 days of birth and completion of the hepatitis B vaccine series and the 4:3:1:3 vaccine series (4 doses of diphtheria-tetanus-pertu...

conclusions the results of this study demonstrated that the tpasp-padre-truncated orf2 gene cassette and the truncated orf2 gene in recombinant plasmids are successfully expressed in eukaryotic cells. the immunogenicity of the two recombinant plasmids with different formulations will be evaluated as a novel dna vaccine in future investigations. results sequence analysis and bioinformatics studi...

Recombinant viral or virus-like particles offer new tools for vaccine development. This study investigated hepatitis B core antigen (HBcAg) capsids and RNA phage Qbeta coats as carriers of a foreign epitope to induce antibody responses in mice. HBcAg capsids were shown to induce T cell-independent (TI) antibodies. We found that these particles behave as antigen-specific TI type 1 (TI-1) Ag comp...