New adjuvant could hold future of vaccine development

Posted In: R&D Daily | Chemistry | Drug Development | Nanomedicine | Vaccines

newsvine diigo google
slashdot
Share
Loading...

Scientists at Oregon State University have developed a new "adjuvant" that could allow the creation of important new vaccines, possibly become a universal vaccine carrier and help medical experts tackle many diseases more effectively.

Adjuvants are substances that are not immunogenic themselves, but increase the immune response when used in combination with a vaccine.

However, due to concerns about safety and toxicity, there's only a single vaccine adjuvant—aluminum hydroxide, or alum—that has been approved for human use in the United States. It's found in such common vaccines as hepatitis B and tetanus. But even though widely used, alum is comparatively weak and will only work with certain diseases.

The new adjuvant is based on nanoparticles prepared with lecithin, a common food product. In animal models, it helped protein antigens to induce an immune response more than six times stronger than when alum was used. Researchers also showed that the lecithin nanoparticles were able to help induce a reasonable antibody response after only one shot, whereas it took at least two shots for the alum adjuvant to work.

Based on their studies, researchers believe the lecithin nanoparticles have wide potential applications and possibly a good safety profile. Their findings were just published in the Journal of Controlled Release, a professional journal in the field of pharmaceutics, in work supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

"In many cases, to make progress with vaccine development we need new adjuvants," said Zhengrong Cui, an assistant professor of pharmaceutics at OSU and corresponding author on the new study. "The material has to be safe, and lecithin is a common food product that's already widely used in pharmaceuticals. This new form of using lecithin nanoparticles as an adjuvant is promising and could become very important."

Vaccine development has always been difficult and at times controversial, Cui said, because of concerns about adverse effects when giving vaccines to healthy people.

Because of that, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has been conservative about approving new vaccine adjuvants, he said. But even the safety issue is complex – to help avoid risk, new vaccines are based on purified compounds from microbes, but these provoke a very weak immune response and often need an adjuvant to boost them. Vaccines could be made based on dead or live attenuated microbes, but that would have a higher level of risk. The ultimate solution is new and improved adjuvants that help address both concerns about safety and efficacy.

Another problem, he said, is that the alum adjuvant that is common in some U.S. vaccines has very limited value in the development of many potential vaccines against viruses or tumors.

By contrast, the lecithin-based nanoparticle adjuvant is more effective. The extraordinarily small particles move easily to the lymphatic system that plays a key role in development of immune response, and they physically "look like" a pathogen to the immune system, which quickly gears up to fight them.

"Our early studies with laboratory animals seem to suggest that a vaccine based on the lecithin nanoparticle adjuvant would not only be more effective, but be tolerated by the body more readily than one using alum," Cui said. "Lecithin is very non-toxic, it's one of many compounds 'generally recognized as safe' by the FDA, and at the injection site we saw none of the nodules and tissue hardening you sometimes see with vaccines that use alum."

If the new adjuvant is ultimately shown to be safe and is approved following clinical trials, Cui said, it could become the basis for a revolution in the production of vaccines and serve as a universal carrier.

Oregon State University

 

0 Comments

blog comments powered by Disqus

New To Market

more

JEOL to launch world's smallest solid-state NMR probe
JEOL to launch world's smallest solid-state NMR probe

According to JEOL Resonance, a new benchmark for resolution and benchmark will be set with its introduction next week of a new 0.75-mm solid state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) probe. The probe is capable of high resolution sample analysis by spinning the sample at 110 kHz, the world's fastest spinning speed for NMR.

Energy Harvesting Subsystems for Wireless Sensors

Nextreme Thermal Solutions has developed two new energy harvesting subsystems for the plumbing and HVAC industries. The subsystems are the latest additions to Nextreme's Thermobility energy harvesting platform that uses thin-film thermoelectric technology to convert available thermal energy into electric power for a variety of autonomous self-powered applications.

Tools & Technology

more

Plates, Stirrers Feature Five or Nine Positions
Plates, Stirrers Feature Five or Nine Positions

Torrey Pines Scientific Inc. has announced a new line of multi-position analog stirring hot plates and stirrers featuring five or nine stirring positions.

Phree Phospholipid Removal Plates

Phenomenex Inc. has introduced Phree phospholipid removal plates for fast cleanup of plasma samples in pharmaceutical and clinical research laboratories. In one step, Phree removes both proteins and phospholipids and delivers the prepared plasma to a collection plate.

Advertisement

Advertisement

Top Stories and Headlines
EVERY DAY!

FREE Email Newsletter