Human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) is an important, ubiquitous pathogen that causes severe clinical disease in immunocompromised individuals, such as organ transplant recipients and infants infected in utero. Antiviral chemotherapy remains problematic due to toxicity of the available compounds and the emergence of viruses resistant to available antiviral therapies. Antiviral antibodies could represen...

background and aims: glycoprotein b (gb) is among the most important immunogenic proteins of hsv-1 that is now being used as recombinant vaccine to induce protectively against the virus. it is believed that gb is responsible for induction of neutralizing antibody and up to 90% of ctl (cytotoxic t cell) activity against hsv-1 in some haplotypes. methods: in the present study the antibody titer i...

The ability to elicit cross-neutralizing antibodies makes human papillomavirus (HPV) L2 capsid protein a possible HPV vaccine. We examined and compared the humoral response of mice immunized with a HPV-16 L2 DNA vaccine or with HPV-16 L2 protein. The L2 DNA vaccine elicited a non-neutralizing antibody response unlike the L2 protein. L2 DNA vaccination suppressed the growth of L2-expressing C3 t...

BACKGROUND Live oral rotavirus vaccines have been less immunogenic and efficacious among children in poor developing countries compared with middle income and industrialized countries for reasons that are not yet completely understood. We assessed whether the neutralizing activity of breast milk could lower the titer of vaccine virus and explain this difference in vitro. METHODS Breast milk s...

This acoustic study has investigated contextual tonal variations in 125 disyllabic words produced by six native speakers of Nanjing Chinese, with five phonemic tones. Three types of tonal variation were observed in the data: neutralizing sandhi, nonneutralizing sandhi and tonal coarticulation. Comparison between the three types of tonal variation suggests that tone sandhi may be rooted in phone...

Toxemia can develop in Clostridium difficile-infected animals, and correlates with severe and fulminant disease outcomes. Circumstantial evidence suggests that toxemia may occur in patients with C. difficile infection (CDI), but positive diagnosis is extremely rare. We analyzed the potential for C. difficile toxemia in patients, determined its characteristics, and assessed challenges. C. diffic...

A substantial proportion of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1)-infected individuals has cross-reactive neutralizing activity in serum, with a similar prevalence in progressors and long-term nonprogressors (LTNP). We studied whether disease progression in the face of cross-reactive neutralizing serum activity is due to fading neutralizing humoral immunity over time or to viral escape. I...

PURPOSE The human tumor-derived soluble MHC I-chain-related molecule (sMIC) is highly immune suppressive in cancer patients and correlates with poor prognosis. However, the therapeutic effect of targeting sMIC has not been determined, due to the limitation that mice do not express homologs of human MIC. This study is to evaluate the therapeutic effect of a monoclonal antibody (mAb) targeting sM...

background: dengue is a global arboviral threat to humans; causing 390 million infections per year. the availability of safe and effective tetravalent dengue vaccine is a global requirement to prevent epidemics, morbidity, and mortality associated with it. methods: five experimental groups (6 mice per group) each of 5-week-old balb/c mice were immunized with vaccine and placebo (empty plasmid) ...

introduction rabies is a fatal disease and has a threatening risk for the public health. immunosuppression is related to a wide variety of diseases. it is recommended that immunosuppressed patients receive the full post-exposure vaccination, concerning that the immune response may be inadequate. the aim of this study is to determine the level of rabies neutralizing antibody in immunosuppressed ...