Development of vaccination strategies based on the OprI lipoprotein from Pseudomonas aeruginosa.

One of the major goals in vaccinology is to develop an immunostimulatory antigen delivery sytem, capable of presenting protective epitopes / antigens in an appropriate way to the immune system to generate a protective immune repons. We developed a novel expression vector that may constitute an important breakthrough in the design of a generic antigen delivery system. This adjuvantcarrier system allows the immunogenic surface-expression on Gram bacteria of a wide variety of antigens / peptides as fusion proteins with the OprL lipoprotein from P. aeruginosa. the resulting fusion proteins represent interesting potentiald for the development of recombinant subunit vaccin since they can induce both humoral and cellular immune responses upon immunisation without additional adjuvant. moreover, within a leismania model, we recently demonstrated that OprI acts as a Th1 inducing natural adjuvant for heterologous antigens. this project aims at further evaluating the potentsial of OprI as a general Type-1 modulating adjuvant. Hetero, OprI will be adoped to immunogenize a variety of antigens and the immune response induced , will be evaluated. At fist instance, we will furtherconcentrate on the Leishmania model where differnet antigens and delivery methods based on OprI will be evaluated. Depending on the results, research will be broadened to other model systems where cellular immunity is required e.g. cancer malaria.