Development of synthetic and Recombinant multi epitope peptide Vaccines for human lymphatic Filariasis

Abstract

newlineLymphatic filariasis is a major cause of clinical suffering disability newlineand handicap caused by the parasitic nematodes W bancrofti and B malayi newlinewhich infects about 128 million people worldwide Hotez 2009 in the newlinetropical countries Vaccine studies in parasitic diseases have been a long term newlinestruggle due to the complex life cycles and immune evasion mechanisms newlineThough recombinant protein vaccines have been studied the presence of newlinehomologous proteins in humans the allelic variants or immunosuppressive newlinedomains in antigens are some of the major drawbacks The antioxidants newlineB malayi thioredoxin TRX and thioredoxin peroxidase and the enzyme newlineinvolved in molting transglutaminase TGA are potential vaccine targets newlineHowever they share sequence homology with mammalian proteins which newlinemay lead to autoimmunity due to cross reactive epitopes Peptide vaccination newlineis an attractive strategy that overcomes these limitations and which has been newlinesuccessfully used for other parasitic infections The L3 stage specific newlineabundant larval transcript ALT 2 protein has shown the highest protection newlineof 76 Ramachandran et al 2004 and hence identification of newlineimmunodominant epitopes or immunosuppressive domains has practical newlineimplications in the understanding and prevention of disease newlineIn this study the epitope regions in the non homologous regions of newlinethe metabolic enzymes TRX TGA and TPX were chosen for development of newlinesynthetic peptide vaccines newline newline