(Press-News.org) A new paper in Biology Methods & Protocols, published by Oxford University Press, indicates that researchers in Germany have developed a new system to display epitopes in mammal cells for immunization studies. They believe that this method can help scientists greatly in immunization efforts.
Promoting blood cells to produce antibodies against a specific viral protein is an important step in developing vaccines for human use. This can be challenging for researchers because whether the subjects develop antibodies depends on how scientists design and administer antigens, which are parts of the virus they’re administering to test the effectiveness of the vaccine.
One very important aspect of virus research is how to express and purify the antigen for vaccination. Animals immunized with prepared antigens produce specific antibodies against the antigen. But scientists have to isolate the antigen to ensure that they develop the vaccine to target the specific disease they wish to combat. Once researchers purify the antigen, they can develop vaccines that lead subjects to produce the desired antibodies. But this isolation is especially time-consuming when attempting to develop lab-produced antigens as a virus often mutates rapidly. It can take several weeks for scientists to develop the right antigens.
Here scientists developed a new method to induce target specific immune responses. By fusing antigen proteins into a tetraspanin-derived anchor membrane-bound protein, the researchers created fusion proteins that are displayed predominantly on the surface of human cells. The exposition of proteins on the surface by a carrier protein induces the production of antibodies directed against the appropriate, relevant, antigens. Of additional advantage is that these antigens have the same conformation and modifications as the corresponding proteins in the virus because they are made by cells similar to that in the human body, which the virus infects naturally.
This new display technology could be a potentially much more reliable immunization technique. In the study here the researchers were able to induce antibodies against different proteins with a focus on the receptor- binding domain of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19). The developed anchor protein allows scientists to target a specific disease for immunization purposes without the need to purify the antigen. The researchers are convinced that this technique can speed up the immunization process enormously.
“This work that is based on the receptor binding domain of SARS-CoV-2 and is only the beginning of a very interesting immunization technique,” said Daniel Ivanusic, one of the paper’s authors. “The most challenging, significant, and exciting application for us employing the tANCHOR technology is to induce neutralizing antibodies against HIV-1. I think this will be great!”
The paper “tANCHOR fast and cost-effective cell-based immunization approach with focus on the receptor-binding domain of SARS-CoV-2” is available (at midnight on December 12, 2023) at: https://doi.org/10.1093/biomethods/bpad030.
Direct correspondence to:
Hubert Bernauer
Chief Executive Officer
ATG:biosynthetics GmbH
Weberstrasse 40
79249 Merzhausen, GERMANY
Hubert.Bernauer@atg-biosynthetics.de
To request a copy of the study, please contact:
Daniel Luzer
daniel.luzer@oup.com
END
Scientists find new, better way to develop vaccines
2023-12-12
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
Creating a future, together, for rare-disease research
2023-12-12
Osaka, Japan – Patients with rare diseases have traditionally been the subjects of medical research. However, in recent years, their role has begun to shift from ‘research participants’ to ‘experts with a lived experience’, with some being involved in study planning, design and interpretation. Additionally they may soon be involved in helping pick the most important areas to prioritize for research.
In a study published last month in the journal Research Involvement and Engagement, researchers from Osaka University created an online space, referred to as the ‘Evidence-generating Commons’, for conversation, collaboration and ...
In a new light – new approach overcomes long-standing limitations in optics
2023-12-12
Osaka, Japan – When you look up at the sky and see clouds of wondrous shapes, or struggle to peer through dense, hazy fog, you’re seeing the results of ‘Mie scattering’, which is what happens with light interacts with particles of a certain size. There is a growing body of research that aims to manipulate this phenomenon and make possible an array of exciting technologies.
Now, in a study recently published in Nature Communications, a multi-institutional research team including Osaka University has overcome what were thought to be fundamental limitations of how to enhance the efficiency of Mie scattering.
Researchers in the field ...
Underwater architects: The ‘burrowing effect’ of foraminifera on marine environments
2023-12-12
Dr. Dewi Langlet, a scientist at the Evolution, Cell Biology and Symbiosis Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST), studies foraminifera, single-cell organisms with shells made of calcium carbonate. He and his collaborators have shown for the first time that the burrowing of single-celled organisms in marine ecosystems affects oxygen distribution and bacterial diversity in sea sediments. Their findings have been published in the journal Biogeosciences.
Foraminifera are mostly marine organisms ...
A scheme for realizing nonreciprocal interlayer coupling in bilayer topological systems
2023-12-12
The exchange of energy and environment is inevitable in any physical system, so non-Hermitian systems that can be described by non-Hermitian Hamiltonians are ubiquitous. There are two kinds of non-Hermitian Hamiltonians, describing nonreciprocal systems with anisotropic coupling, also referred to as nonreciprocal coupling, and gain-loss systems. Three physicists won the Nobel physics prize for their discovery of topological phases and transitions in 2016. Recently, an emerging interplay of topological photonics and non-Hermitian photonics has ...
Combination immunotherapy produces high response rate in early results of Sylvester trial targeting high-risk follicular lymphoma
2023-12-12
DOWNOADABLE VIDEO
MIAMI, FLORIDA (EMBARGOED UNTIL MONDAY, DEC. 11, 2023 AT 8:45 P.M. ET) – Researchers conducting a Phase 2 clinical trial at Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine say a new combination of antibody therapies produced a ‘surprisingly high’ response rate in patients with high-risk follicular lymphoma, a type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
Based on these initial findings – reported in an oral presentation at the 65th ASH Annual Meeting and Exposition in San Diego, California, Dec. 9-12 – the research team plans to expand the number of trial participants ...
Multicenter study at Sylvester, other academic centers shows CAR-T cell therapy safe, effective even for high-risk patients
2023-12-12
DOWNLOADABLE VIDEO IS AVAILABLE HERE
MIAMI, FLORIDA (EMBARGOED UNTIL MONDAY, DEC. 11, 2023, AT 8:45 PM ET) – CAR-T cell therapy is a safe and effective treatment for diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL), even for patients regarded as high risk due to comorbidities.
That’s the conclusion of a five-year analysis of results from the U.S. Lymphoma CAR-T Cell Consortium, a group of 17 academic cancer centers in the U.S. Their findings will be presented at the American Society of Hematology’s 2023 annual meeting in San Diego, Dec. 9-12.
“CAR-T has caused a paradigm shift in the treatment of patients with diffuse large B-cell ...
Clinical trial proves that the ketogenic diet is effective at controlling polycystic kidney disease
2023-12-12
(Santa Barbara, Calif.) — It’s official: The ketogenic diet proved to be effective at controlling polycystic kidney disease (PKD) in the first randomized controlled clinical trial of ketogenic metabolic therapy for PKD.
“I’m really happy about these clinical trial results,” said UC Santa Barbara biologist Thomas Weimbs, whose lab was part of an international collaboration to investigate the effect of the fasting response known as ketosis on the cysts that are the hallmark of the disease. “We now have the first evidence in humans that the cysts really don’t like ...
New drug helps narrow racial survival disparity in patients with acute myeloid leukemia
2023-12-12
SAN DIEGO – Non-Hispanic Black patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) are living longer, now that new therapies are available, according to a study presented by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine and Penn Medicine’s Abramson Cancer Center at the 65th American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting and Exposition (Abstract 955).
In the past, the standard treatment for AML, a cancer that affects the blood and bone marrow, was intensive chemotherapy. Unfortunately, many older patients were ineligible ...
Scientific community: Ukraine may have lost 20% of its pre-war scientific research capacity
2023-12-12
Ukraine may have lost about 20% of its scientific research capacity — time directly spent by scientists on research activities — as a consequence of the Russia-Ukraine war. The findings, published in Humanities & Social Sciences Communications, also suggest that over 17% of scientists who were research active in Ukraine before the war may have left the scientific research sector by December 2022.
Since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, there has been disruption to many sectors of the Ukrainian economy, including the Ukrainian scientific research sector. However, it has so far proved difficult to quantify many of the key impacts of the ...
Ukraine has lost 18% of its scientists due to the war
2023-12-12
Until the early morning of February 24th, 2022, Ukrainian scientist Olena Iarmosh did not believe there would be a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Iarmosh grew up and had settled in Kharkiv, her beloved city in Eastern Ukraine and only 40 km away from the Russian border, where she worked for more than 16 years as a lecturer in higher education before fleeing to Switzerland. At approximately 5AM, she awoke to the sounds of bombing, hoping that they were merely the loud sounds of technical maintenance at the local power plant.
“My city looks worse now after the bombing than after two occupations by German troops,” ...