The effectiveness of mRNA vaccines largely depends on their lipid nanoparticle (LNP) component. Herein, we investigate the effectiveness of DLin-KC2-DMA (KC2) and SM-102-based LNPs for the intramuscular delivery of a plasmid encoding B.1.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn recent years, lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) have emerged as a revolutionary technology for vaccine delivery. LNPs serve as an integral component of mRNA vaccines by protecting and transporting the mRNA payload into host cells. Despite their prominence in mRNA vaccines, there remains a notable gap in our understanding of the potential application of LNPs for the delivery of DNA vaccines.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: The incidence of Lyme disease (LD) in Canada and the United States has risen over the last decade, nearing 480,000 cases each year. sensu lato, the causative agent of LD, is transmitted to humans through the bite of an infected tick, resulting in flu-like symptoms and often a characteristic bull's-eye rash. In more severe cases, disseminated bacterial infection can cause arthritis, carditis and neurological impairments.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: Geriatric nursing staff are exposed to high workloads, which often lead to stress, incapacity to work and early retirement. Personal resources can help deal with work demands and can have a positive effect on health. To design tailored interventions, this study aims to identify personal resources of staff and its impact on stress levels.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCoherent forecasting techniques for count processes generate forecasts that consist of count values themselves. In practice, forecasting always relies on a fitted model and so the obtained forecast values are affected by estimation uncertainty. Thus, they may differ from the true forecast values as they would have been obtained from the true data generating process.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProduct excipients are used to confer a number of desirable properties on the drug substance to maintain or improve stability and facilitate drug delivery. This is especially important for products where the active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) is a recombinant protein. In this study, we aimed to determine if excipients and formulation conditions affect the structure and/or modulate the dynamics of the protein API of filgrastim products.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe have previously identified extensive glycation, bound fatty acids and increased quantities of protein aggregates in commercially available recombinant HSA (rHSA) expressed in Oryza sativa (Asian rice) (OsrHSA) when compared to rHSA from other expression systems. We propose these differences may alter some attributes of nanoparticles fabricated with OsrHSA, as studies have associated greater quantities of aggregates with increased nanoparticle diameters. To determine if this is the case, nanoparticles were fabricated with OsrHSA from various suppliers using ethanol desolvation and subsequent glutaraldehyde cross-linking.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA pH-driven DNA nanomachine based on the human α-thrombin binding aptamer was designed for the specific catch-and-release of human α-thrombin at neutral and acidic pH, respectively. In neutral conditions, the thrombin aptamer component of the nanomachine is exposed and exists in the G-quadruplex conformation required to bind to the target protein. At slightly acidic pH, the polyadenine tail of the nanomachine becomes partially protonated and A+(anti)•G(syn) mispairing results in a conformational change, causing the target protein to be released.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMicroflow digital imaging (MDI) has become a widely accepted method for assessing sub-visible particles in pharmaceutical formulations however, to date; no data have been presented on the utility of this methodology when formulations include opaque vaccine adjuvants. This study evaluates the ability of MDI to assess sub-visible particles under these conditions. A Fluid Imaging Technologies Inc.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHuman serum albumin (HSA) is a versatile and important protein for the pharmaceutical industry (Fanali et al., Mol. Aspects Med.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFContext: At elevated temperatures, studies have shown that serum albumin undergoes irreversible changes to its secondary structure. Anionic fatty acids and/or anionic surfactants have been shown to stabilize human serum albumin (HSA) against thermal denaturation through bridging hydrophobic domains and cationic amino acids residues of the protein.
Objective: As albumin can readily interact with a variety of liposomes, this study proposes that cardiolipin delivered via 1,2-dipalmitoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine (DPPC) liposomes can improve the thermal stability of recombinant HSA produced in Saccharomyces cerevisiae (ScrHSA) in a similar manner to anionic fatty acids.
Previous studies have demonstrated that liposome-protein interactions can result in changes to the thermal stability of the protein. We utilized far-UV circular dichroism spectropolarimetry and fluorescence spectroscopy to investigate the interaction of 1,2-dipalmitoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine (DPPC) liposomes with two recombinant human serum albumins (rHSA). We demonstrate that rHSA expressed in Oryza sativa (OsrHSA) has improved secondary structure thermal stability compared to rHSA expressed in Pichia pastoris (PprHSA).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: Thermal stability is considered an indication of protein fold and conformational stability. We investigate the influence of glycosylation on the thermal stability of interferon alpha 2b (IFN α-2b).
Methods: Far ultraviolet light circular dichroism spectroscopy (UV CD) and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) were used to assess the thermal stability of the European Directorate for the Quality of Medicines IFN α-2b reference standards as well as an O-linked glycosylated IFN α-2b produced in human embryonic kidney cells.
We report here our preliminary investigations on the mechanism of alpha-TTP-mediated ligand transfer as assessed using fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) assays. These assays monitor the movement of the model alpha-tocopherol fluorescent derivative ((R)-2,5,7,8-tetramethyl-chroman-2-[9-(7-nitro-benzo[1,2,5]oxadiazol-4-yl amino)-nonyl]-chroman-6-ol; NBD-Toc) from protein to acceptor vesicles containing the fluorescence quencher TRITC-PE. We have found that alpha-TTP utilizes a collisional mechanism of ligand transfer requiring direct protein-membrane contact, that rates of ligand transfer are greater to more highly curved lipid vesicles, and that such rates are insensitive to the presence of anionic phospholipids in the acceptor membrane.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNovel fluorescent analogues of alpha-tocopherol have been prepared that incorporate the useful fluorophores nitrobenoxadiazyl (NBD) and anthroyloxy (AO). Both fluorescent tocopherol analogues bind specifically to recombinant human tocopherol transfer protein (hTTP). The NBD-alpha-tocopherol is particularly useful for protein-binding assays, whereas the AO-alpha-tocopherol was designed to be one of a pair of chromophores for a fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) assay of intervesicular tocopherol transfer.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF