Publications related to Enhanced and Enduring Protection against Tuberculosis by Recombinant BCG-Ag85C and Its Association with Modulation of Cytokine Profile in Lung

Single-cell analysis of the interactions between Mycobacterium tuberculosis and macrophages

Mycobacterium Tuberculosis is a highly effective pathogen infecting nearly a third of the world's population. An M. tuberculosis infection starts when droplets containing bacteria enter an individual's lungs. The first host cells to contact the bacteria ar ...

EPFL2024

Human alveolar lining fl uid from the elderly promotes Mycobacterium tuberculosis intracellular growth and translocation into the cytosol of alveolar epithelial cells

Vivek Vijay Thacker, Richa Mishra

The elderly population is highly susceptible to developing respiratory diseases, including tuberculosis, a devastating disease caused by the airborne pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis ( M.tb ) that kills one person every 18 seconds. Once M.tb reaches the ...

Elsevier Science Inc2024

Preexisting Heterogeneity of Inducible Nitric Oxide Synthase Expression Drives Differential Growth of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in Macrophages

John McKinney, Ophélie Rutschmann, Chiara Toniolo

Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection is initiated by the inhalation and implantation of bacteria in the lung alveoli, where they are phagocytosed by macrophages. Even a single bacterium may be sufficient to initiate infection. Thereafter, the clinical outc ...

AMER SOC MICROBIOLOGY2022

On the exploration of novel methodological approaches for immunogen design: case studies in influenza and hepatitis C

Andreas Scheck

Proteins are fundamental components in biological systems and crucial for a variety of biological functions. Over the last decades, significant progress in structural biology has facilitated the study of proteins and their interactions with molecular partn ...

EPFL2021

FasR Regulates Fatty Acid Biosynthesis and Is Essential for Virulence of Mycobacterium tuberculosis

Stewart Cole, Claudia Sala

Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the etiologic agent of human tuberculosis, is the world's leading cause of death from an infectious disease. One of the main features of this pathogen is the complex and dynamic lipid composition of the cell envelope, which adap ...

Frontiers Media SA2020

Polarly Localized EccE(1) Is Required for ESX-1 Function and Stabilization of ESX-1 Membrane Proteins in Mycobacterium tuberculosis

Stewart Cole, Claudia Sala, Ming Zhang, Jérémie Piton, Paloma Julia Soler Arnedo

Mycobacterium tuberculosis is a slow-growing intracellular bacterium with the ability to induce host cell death and persist indefinitely in the human body. This pathogen uses the specialized ESX-1 secretion system to secrete virulence factors and potent im ...

American Society for Microbiology2020

Redox-Responsive Polycondensate Neoepitope for Enhanced Personalized Cancer Vaccine

Li Tang, Lixia Wei, Yu Zhao, Xiaomeng Hu

A versatile and highly effective platform remains a major challenge in the development of personalized cancer vaccines. Here, we devised a redox-responsive polycondensate neoepitope (PNE) through a reversible polycondensation reaction of peptide neoantigen ...

2020

Functional de novo Protein Design for Targeted Vaccines and Synthetic Biology Applications

Che Yang

Evolution has created, selected and evolved large repertoires of proteins that operate in various biological systems. Nowadays biotechnological needs are coming up orders of magnitude faster than proteins naturally evolve. The emergence of de novo protein ...

EPFL2020

Rationally designed Human Cytomegalovirus gB nanoparticle vaccine with improved immunogenicity

Davide Demurtas

Author summary Human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) infection is the foremost viral cause of congenital birth defects. Attempts to vaccinate against HCMV brought moderate, though not sufficient, reduction in infection. Moreover, phase II clinical trial with gB for ...

2020

Monitoring Tuberculosis Drug Activity in Live Animals by Using Near-Infrared Fluorescence Imaging

Stewart Cole, Raphael Christopher Sommer

Worldwide, tuberculosis (TB) is the leading cause of death due to infection with a single pathogenic agent, Mycobacterium tuberculosis. In the absence of an effective vaccine, new, more powerful antibiotics are required to halt the growing spread of multid ...

AMER SOC MICROBIOLOGY2019

Preexisting variation in DNA damage response predicts the fate of single mycobacteria under stress

John McKinney, Neeraj Dhar, Giulia Manina, Lalit Kumar Singh

Clonal microbial populations are inherently heterogeneous, and this diversification is often considered as an adaptation strategy. In clinical infections, phenotypic diversity is found to be associated with drug tolerance, which in turn could evolve into g ...

2019

Single-cell studies of Mycobacterium smegmatis cell cycle using time-lapse fluorescence microscopy

Joëlle Xiao Yuan Ven

Cell division is one of the most primordial cellular processes and is essential for life propagation. It is composed of crucial events, namely genome duplication, chromosomes segregation and membrane separation. Failure of these processes will have dramati ...

EPFL2019

Deciphering the molecular basis of mycobacteria and lipoglycan recognition by the C-type lectin Dectin-2

Alexiane Clara Decout

Dectin-2 is a C-type lectin involved in the recognition of several pathogens such as Aspergillus fumigatus, Candida albicans, Schistosoma mansonii, and Mycobacterium tuberculosis that triggers Th17 immune responses. Identifying pathogen ligands and underst ...

Nature Research2018

Functional characterization of the virulence determinant ESX-1 from Mycobacterium tuberculosis

Paloma Julia Soler Arnedo

Tuberculosis (TB) is a chronic infectious disease that mainly affects the lungs and causes extensive human morbidity and mortality. It results from infection with Mycobacterium tuberculosis, a slow-growing intracellular pathogen that can replicate and surv ...

EPFL2018

EspL is essential for virulence and stabilizes EspE, EspF and EspH levels in Mycobacterium tuberculosis

Stewart Cole, Claudia Sala, Andrej Benjak, Nina Theres Odermatt, Sofia Ulrika Magnusdotter Von Schultz, Paloma Julia Soler Arnedo

The ESX-1, type VII, secretion system represents the major virulence determinant of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, one of the most successful intracellular pathogens. Here, by combining genetic and high-throughput approaches, we show that EspL, a protein of 1 ...

PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE2018

Development of a nano-adjuvant cancer vaccine and its evaluation for melanoma in combination with radiotherapy

Sylvie Hauert

Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the world and melanoma is the deadliest type of skin cancer. Although surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy are still standard treatments, the discovery of the role played by the immune system in cancer has a ...

EPFL2018

Engineering cancer vaccines using stimuli-responsive biomaterials

Li Tang, Yugang Guo, Yu Zhao

Cancer vaccines aimed at expanding the pool or increasing the activity of tumor-specific T cells against malignancies is an important immunotherapy modality that has been extensively pursued in the past decades. However, the clinical efficacy of cancer vac ...

2018

Toll-like receptor 8 agonist nanoparticles mimic immunomodulating effects of the live BCG vaccine and enhance neonatal innate and adaptive immune responses

Jeffrey Alan Hubbell, Melody Swartz, Alexandre de Titta, Sachiko Hirosue, Daniel Kenneth Bonner

Background: Newborns display distinct immune responses, leaving them vulnerable to infections and impairing immunization. Targeting newborn dendritic cells (DCs), which integrate vaccine signals into adaptive immune responses, might enable development of a ...

2017

Protein engineering approaches for direct antigen targeting in CD8+ T cell inducing vaccines

Vasiliki Panagiotou

Effective vaccine design and public vaccination programs have led to the eradication of several diseases and protected millions of people from deadly infections. However, intracellular infections remain a challenge and their eradication requires the activa ...

EPFL2016

A Cationic Micelle Complex Improves CD8+T Cell Responses in Vaccination Against Unmodified Protein Antigen

Jeffrey Alan Hubbell, Melody Swartz, Davide Demurtas, Vasiliki Panagiotou, Carrie Ellen Brubaker, Daniel Kenneth Bonner

Nanoscale carrier platforms promote immune responses to vaccination by facilitating delivery of vaccine components to immunologically relevant sites. The technique is particularly valuable for subunit vaccination, in which coadministration of immunostimula ...

Amer Chemical Soc2016