Objective(s): After decades of containment, pertussis disease, caused by Bordetella pertussis seems to be re-emerging and still remains a major cause of reported vaccine-preventable deaths worldwide. The current licensed whole-cell vaccines display reactogenicity while acellular vaccines are expensive and do not induce Th1-type immune responses that are required for optimum protection against t...

Food or water-borne enteric pathogens invade their hosts via intestinal mucosal surfaces, thus developing effective oral vaccines would greatly reduce the burden of infectious diseases. The nature of the antigen, as well as the mode of its internalization in the intestinal mucosa affects the ensuing immune response. We show that model protein antigen ovalbumin (Ova) given per-orally (p.o.) indu...

Cervical cancer is the second largest cause of cancer-related death in women worldwide, and it occurs following persistent infection, sometimes for decades, with a specific subset of human papillomavirus (HPV) types; the approximately 13 oncogenic subtypes. Prophylactic vaccines against HPV infections hold promise for cost-effective reductions in the incidence of cervical cancer, but this may n...

BACKGROUND Infections remain one of the leading causes of morbidity in pregnant women and newborns, with vaccine-preventable infections contributing significantly to the burden of disease. In the past decade, maternal vaccination has emerged as a promising public health strategy to prevent and combat maternal, fetal and neonatal infections. Despite a number of universally recommended maternal v...

The mechanisms regulating systemic and mucosal IgA responses in the respiratory tract are incompletely understood. Using virus-like particles loaded with single-stranded RNA as a ligand for TLR7, we found that systemic vs mucosal IgA responses in mice were differently regulated. Systemic IgA responses following s.c. immunization were T cell independent and did not require TACI or TGFbeta, where...

A major goal of HIV-1 vaccine development is the induction of mucosal immune responses able to stop or reduce viral infection directly at the portal of entry. We established a heterologous prime/boost vaccination protocol based on intradermal priming with the HIV-1 Tat protein and intranasal boosting with the Tat protein co-administered with the mucosal adjuvant MALP-2. Strong Tat-specific humo...

Pertussis incidence is rising in almost every country where acellular pertussis (aP) vaccines have been introduced, and is occurring across all age groups from infancy to adulthood. The key question is why? While several known factors such as waning of immunity, detection bias due to more sensitive tests and higher awareness of the disease among practitioners, and evolutionary shifts among B. p...

Vaccination, which provides effective, safe infectious disease protection, is among the most important recent public health and immunological achievements. However, infectious disease remains the leading cause of death in developing countries because several vaccines require repeated administrations and children are often incompletely immunized. Microsphere-based systems, providing controlled r...