Associate Professor
Suman Tapryal
Department of Biophysics, University of Delhi South Campus, New Delhi, India
Title of the talk: Coupling subunit-vaccine oligomerization with immune modulation to elicit a Th1 biased immune response in mice
Abstract
Viral infections are one of the major global health concerns of humans in current times. The rising world population, climate change, and other localized issues are creating niche for immergence and spread of novel infectious agents, that demand rapid response from the health providers in terms of therapy and prophylactic measures. Vaccines are the effectors that may hinder or halt the spread of such infections on the global scale. Protein vaccines of either subunit, DNA or RNA formats, are required to elicit protective immunity in subjects, especially Th1 type, to resolve the infections effectively. The major limitation of this format lies in its low to moderate immunogenicity and short-term range of protection.
Our lab study of fusing vaccine antigens with Fc of IgM, which oligomerized the Ag like an IgM molecule, demonstrated promising results in terms of generation of high titer humoral response along with almost simultaneous elicitation of a Th1 type cellular response. Such a response is the most desired one in case of subunit vaccines that are reported generally to elicit moderate humoral immune response with a balanced Th1/Th2 cellular response. This hypothesis was tested using envelope protein E2 of Chikungunya virus, wherein, the E2-FcIgM fusion protein was expressed in E. coli and the in vitro refolded candidate protein was used to immunize mice. The immune analysis of the released antibodies and profiling of cytokines released by isolated spelenocytes under the stimulation of antigen, suggested a direct role of Fc IgM in elicitation of the observed Th1 biased immune response in mice. This vaccine design has the potential to be used as the immune modulator in other viral and cancer vaccines.
Biography
Dr. Suman Tapryal has completed her Ph.D. at the age of 30 years from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India and postdoctoral studies from Indian Institute of Immunology, New Delhi. She is an Associate Professor at the Department of Biophysics, University of Delhi South Campus, a premier university of India. She works in the field of vaccines and has handled various government funded projects for the development of vaccines for chikungunya and genital herpes and has published her work in reputed journals. In addition to vaccines, Dr. Suman’s lab also focuses on drug discovery and enzyme engineering.
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