Grant: Vaccines of the 21st Century

Vaccination has been the most efficient method for the control of infectious diseases, leading to eradication of small pox. Paradoxally, most vaccines on the market provide partial protection, and moreover, there is still a strong need to develop efficient vaccines against cancers. Therefore, the development of vaccine platforms and adjuvants have been identified as the second and third top ten priorities by an eminent group of researchers and health specialists for improvement of health worldwide. Cancers generate a medical need for novel and efficient immunomodulatory molecules that could improve vaccines and be used in its treatment. We have recently shown that virus-like particles (VLPs) derived from the papaya mosaic virus (PapMV) are excellent adjuvant that can trigger both arms of the immune system, the humoral (antibodies) and the cellular cytotoxic (CTL) responses. Therefore, this adjuvant respond to an unmet medical need because it can contribute to increase the immune response to current vaccine and serve as a platform for the vaccine design of more sophisticated subunit candidate vaccine. In this proposal, we will exploit PapMV vaccine platform and link to several targets from cancer cells. Furthermore, we propose to take advantage of the plasticity of the PapMV platform to generate improved versions of this adjuvant using rational design and protein engineering. We believe that the outcome of this research proposal will have a major impact in the field of vaccinology against cancer.