Grant: Vaccines of the 21st Century

Asthma in Canada has been increasing over the last 20 years with currently over 3 million Canadians suffering from asthma. According to the World Health Organization, asthma is now a global public health problem with over 100 million sufferers worldwide. The economic costs associated with asthma are estimated to exceed those of TB and HIV/AIDS combined. Although it can be diagnosed at any age, it is mainly infants and children who are prone to contract asthma. Strategies to prevent or cure asthma early in life are thus urgently needed. Vaccines protecting from infections have been the most successful medical intervention of the 20th century. Ideal would be a vaccine that could protect or cure infants from asthma after only one dose given very early in life. Such a vaccine would have the potential to impact the health and quality of life for millions of children, saving public health delivery systems millions in Canada and billions across the globe. Such a vaccine would truly be a "Vaccine for the 21th century". We have successfully developed a novel, highly promising vaccine platform based on the bacterium Listeria monocytogenes (Lm) which is safe and extremely well-tolerated by newborn mice. We have chosen Lm, since previous work had suggested this might be a good way of reducing the risk of asthma. Our preliminary experiments suggest that our Lm-based vaccine is capable of inducing strong non-allergic protective immune responses for their entire life only after one dose given at birth. We now need to test this in more detail, and see if it not only prevents but possibly cures asthma in animal models. And we need to figure out why exactly it works so well. The success of this Lm-based one-shot vaccination approach may lead to large reductions in morbidity and mortality due to asthma and ultimately help to bridge the knowledge gap that hampers development of new vaccines as well as provide future research developments in Canada as "Vaccine for the 21st century".