Vacinas & Adjuvantes: Imunomodeladores de Nanopartículas

Overview

About 3 million people die each year from vaccine-preventable diseases, mostly concentrated in poor countries. Developing vaccines for poor countries is the main mission of this research group. More stable and needle-free, self-administrable, oral and intranasal vaccines would help, not only to increase the vaccine coverage, but also to decrease the infections associated with bad clinical practices during the administration of injectables. The group have been working on the re-designing of the hepatitis B vaccine with the aim of helping WHO achieve one of the 2030 elimination targets.

To achieve its Mission, this research group has established the following objectives:

• To design a therapeutic hepatitis B vaccine
• To develop adjuvants for intranasal vaccines to protect against respiratory infections including the new SARS-COV-2
• To design vaccine adjuvants for the oral route of administration.
• To design adjuvants for the more stable genetic (DNA and RNA) vaccines.

The nanotechnology is the facilitating tool to obtain ‘pathogen-like’ particulate adjuvants. Our research group assumed that combining on same nanoparticle several immunopotentiators, the resultant adjuvant would have predictable immunomodulatory properties for an intended vaccine. Therefore, the main objective has been to design and develop the methods for obtaining polymeric nanoparticles with pathogen-mimicking characteristics.

Techniques and Expertise

Preparation methods to obtain antigen and/or immunopotentiator loaded polymeric nanoparticles; Physicochemical characterization of the nanoparticles using standardized methods and protocols; Interaction studies of the nanoparticles with biological membranes and with immune cells; immunotoxicological tests with nanoparticles; immunization studies and evaluation of the cellular and humoral immune response.