Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

It is well-known that vaccines represent powerful and effective tools for global health and economic growth. In the veterinary field, these are undoubtedly key tools for improving productivity and/or circumventing zoonoses. Although vaccines licensed so far have been successfully used for many years in livestock animals, they have limitations, such as variable efficacy, adverse effects, and some shortcomings. Moreover, rapidly evolving pathogens having high variability or emerging and re-emerging pathogens for which no effective vaccines exist are major issues in veterinary infectiology. It is also believed that on going climate changes will favor the emergence and re-emergence of such infectious agents in the coming years/decades. Altogether, these observations indicate the continuing need for new vaccine alternatives to control infectious outbreaks. In the last decade, nanotechnologies have raised great interest owing to the potential applications in the medical field, including vaccination against infectious agents. What that in mind, my laboratory has been interested in peptides with self-assembly capability to generate cross-ß (beta)-sheet nanostructures (nanoparticles) with the goal of developing new-generation vaccines, termed nanovaccines. Not only the nanoparticles we generated were able to deliver the immunogens to induce a specific/robust immune response, but also these have been shown to exert an intrinsic adjuvant activity to increase the immune response to these immunogens. In addition, these nanovaccine formulations generated protection against virus challenge in mouse models. The long-term goal/objective of my Discovery research program is to is to develop effective, versatile and robust nanoparticle-based vaccines to fight animal viral diseases, I will target in my projects the highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses (for instance H5N1) and the African swine fever virus that are considered the two most preoccupant animal infectious diseases worldwide at this moment, and more likely, in the coming years. The proposed technology to be derived from my research program will likely be adaptable to various infectious systems, regardless of the microbial nature of the pathogen, and will thus contribute to the development of next-generation efficient vaccines against a panoply of infectious agents.