Production and Preliminary In Vivo Evaluations of a Novel in silico-designed L2-based Potential HPV Vaccine.

Background: L2-based Human Papillomavirus (HPV) prophylactic vaccines, containing epitopes from HPV minor capsid proteins, are under investigation as second-generation HPV vaccines. No such vaccine has passed clinical trials yet, mainly due to the low immunogenicity of peptide vaccines; so efforts are being continued. A candidate vaccine composed of two HPV16 L2 epitopes, flagellin and a Toll-Like Receptor (TLR) 4 agonist (RS09) as adjuvants, and two universal T-helper epitopes was designed in silico in our previous researches.

Structural vaccinology considerations for in silico designing of a multi-epitope vaccine.

Multi-epitope peptide vaccines, as a kind of fusion proteins, usually possess a string-of-beads structure, consisting of several peptidic epitopes, probably adjuvants and linkers. Very numerous options are possible in selecting the order of different segments and linkers. Such factors can affect the vaccine efficacy through impacting physicochemical characteristics and protein tertiary structure.

A novel HPV prophylactic peptide vaccine, designed by immunoinformatics and structural vaccinology approaches.

Human papillomavirus (HPV)-caused cervical cancer is the fourth common female cancer globally. Despite availability of three effective vaccines in market, development of HPV prophylactic vaccines is still pursued due to affordability issues and type-restricted protection of the marketed vaccines. Investigational second generation prophylactic HPV vaccines are mostly exploiting epitopes from the virus minor capsid protein (L2), which despite many advantages suffer from low immunogenicity, a common problem of epitope vaccines.

Epithelial uptake and transport of cell-free human immunodeficiency virus type 1 and gp120-coated microparticles.

Cell-free human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) can be taken up and released by a monolayer of primary human gingival cells and remain infectious for CD4+ cells. Virus-sized latex particles covalently coated with purified native HIV-1 envelope glycoprotein gp120 are also transported through the primary epithelial cells. This process is significantly stimulated by increasing the intracellular cyclic AMP (cAMP) concentration.