Influenza epidemics and pandemics are major threats to human health. Vaccination is the primary strategy for the control of annual and emerging influenza pandemics. Present influenza vaccine platforms and production systems are inflexible, slow, expensive, and cannot rapidly respond to an emerging strain of virus. Thus, new technologies for the rapid development and production of influenza vaccines are urgently needed. With these challenges in mind this proposal is aimed at demonstrating the feasibility of implementing a vaccine strategy combining the novel technologies of Bacterial Ghosts, DNA minicircles, and proteomics-based antibody epitope mapping. Proteomics technologies will be used to rapidly identify antibody binding epitopes in the influenza H1 protein using sera from animals exposed to H1 protein or H1 containing virus. The resulting epitopes will be used to develop and produce Bacterial Ghost vaccines with immobilized minicircle DNA constructs. Bacterial Ghosts have recently been used as carriers and stimulators of DNA minicircle vaccines with promising results. DNA minicircles eliminate many of the risks involved in vaccination with plasmid DNA and are incorporated into BG in a one-step low cost production process. Animals will undergo a scheduled vaccination scheme using the produced Bacterial Ghost vaccines and the immune response will be assessed.
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