logo
ResearchBunny Logo
Vaccine design via antigen reorientation

Medicine and Health

Vaccine design via antigen reorientation

D. Xu, J. J. Carter, et al.

This groundbreaking research by Duo Xu and colleagues explores a novel method of antigen orientation that significantly enhances immune responses to influenza vaccines. By reorienting hemagglutinin proteins, the study reveals a generalizable strategy for delivering epitope-focused vaccines that can effectively target diverse influenza A subtypes and potentially other viral antigens.

00:00
00:00
Playback language: English
Abstract
Creating universal influenza vaccines is challenging due to the focus of immune responses on the variable head region of hemagglutinin (HA-head) rather than the conserved stem region (HA-stem). This study introduces a method to control antigen orientation using site-specific aspartate residue insertion, enhancing antigen binding to alum. This approach, tested on Ebola, SARS-CoV-2, and influenza antigens, consistently improved neutralizing antibody responses. Reorienting an H2 HA in an ‘upside-down’ configuration increased HA-stem exposure and immunogenicity, inducing stem-directed antibodies cross-reactive with group 1 and 2 influenza A subtypes. Electron microscopy polyclonal epitope mapping confirmed that the reoriented H2 HA elicited cross-reactive antibodies targeting group 2 HA-stems. Antigen reorientation is presented as a generalizable strategy for designing epitope-focused vaccines.
Publisher
Nature Chemical Biology
Published On
Jan 15, 2024
Authors
Duo Xu, Joshua J. Carter, Chunfeng Li, Ashley Utz, Payton A. B. Weidenbacher, Shaogeng Tang, Mrinmoy Sanyal, Bali Pulendran, Christopher O. Barnes, Peter S. Kim
Tags
influenza vaccine
hemagglutinin
antigen orientation
immunogenicity
neutralizing antibodies
epitope-focused vaccines
viral antigens
Listen, Learn & Level Up
Over 10,000 hours of research content in 25+ fields, available in 12+ languages.
No more digging through PDFs, just hit play and absorb the world's latest research in your language, on your time.
listen to research audio papers with researchbunny