A main complication of treatment of patients with hemophilia A is the development of anti-factor VIII (fVIII) antibodies. The immunogenicity of fVIII potentially is a function of its procoagulant activity, which may result in danger signals that drive the immune response. Alternatively, intrinsic structural elements in fVIII may be particularly immunogenic. Finally, VWF, the carrier protein for...

Vibrio vulnificus infection can cause necrotizing fasciitis and sepsis and can develop within a few days despite intensive care. The mortality rate is up to 60% in vulnerable people. Most patients infected with this microbe have chronic liver disease, especially liver cirrhosis or cancer, as an underlying disease. V. vulnificus infection is opportunistic, and there is an urgent need to develop ...

The immune activity of an antibody is directed against a specific region on its target antigen known as the epitope. Numerous immunodetection and immunotheraputics applications are based on the ability of antibodies to recognize epitopes. The detection of immunogenic regions is often an essential step in these applications. The experimental approaches used for detecting immunogenic regions are ...

Streptococcus pneumoniae causes annually 826 000 deaths in children under fi ve years. The serotype 6B, one of higher incidence, is targeted by the Cuban research and development project to develop a conjugate vaccine. There is limited data on how modifi cations caused by conjugation affect the physicochemical and antigenic characteristics of polysaccharides, particularly for serotype 6B capsul...

Sepsis and meningitis caused by Neisseria meningitidis serogroup B (NMGB) are serious diseases in infants and young adults, but no effective vaccine is available. The capsular polysaccharide (PS) of NMGB has poor immunogenicity and a structural similarity to polysialic acid (PSA) on neuronal tissue that may elicit autoantibodies. Using HmenB3, a protective and nonautoreactive monoclonal antibod...

The Her-2/neu protooncogene is associated with malignant transformation and aggressive disease. Because of its overexpression in tumor cells and because it has been shown to be immunogenic, this protein represents an excellent target for T-cell immunotherapy. By identifying potential HLA-A2.1-binding peptides from the Her-2/neu sequence, peptides were selected as candidate T-cell epitopes. The ...

Glycans at the forefront of cells facilitate immune recognition processes. Cancer cells commonly present altered cell surface glycosylation, especially manifested in the expression of sialic acid at the termini of glycolipids and glycoproteins. Although tumor-associated carbohydrate antigens (TACAs) result in expression of altered-self, most such carbohydrates do not elicit strong humoral respo...

The immunogenicity of variable regions of hepatitis C virus (HCV) proteins was studied by ELISA by using 543 synthetic peptides from 120 variable regions and 90 sera from HCV-infected patients. Some regions from certain genotypes were less immunogenic, or even non-immunogenic, compared with their equivalents in other genotypes. However, the mean recognition of all peptides from genotypes 1a, 1b...

Tumor Associated Antigens (TAAs) are the privileged targets of almost all the cancer vaccines tested to date. Unfortunately all these vaccines failed to show a clinical efficacy. The main reason for this failure is the immune tolerance to TAAs that are self-proteins expressed by normal and cancer cells. Self-tolerance to TAAs is directed against their dominant rather than against their cryptic ...

Surface-exposed calreticulin (ecto-CRT) and secreted ATP are crucial damage-associated molecular patterns (DAMPs) for immunogenic apoptosis. Inducers of immunogenic apoptosis rely on an endoplasmic reticulum (ER)-based (reactive oxygen species (ROS)-regulated) pathway for ecto-CRT induction, but the ATP secretion pathway is unknown. We found that after photodynamic therapy (PDT), which generate...