Producing better antiviral peptide vaccines
Natural viral proteins cannot constantly be used as optimal vaccines because they do not always stimulate efficiently the immune system. In December 1 Journal of Clinical Investigation, Jeffrey Ahlers and colleagues from National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, USA, show that sequence modification of natural viral proteins to increase epitope affinity for class II MHC molecules (epitope enhancement) can improve immunogenicity.Ahlers et al. found that modification of a Th cell epitope to increase
Dec 18, 2001
Natural viral proteins cannot constantly be used as optimal vaccines because they do not always stimulate efficiently the immune system. In December 1
Ahlers
"If such enhanced epitopes can be shown to activate costimulatory pathways and to increase Th1 polarization in other settings,...