Beschreibung
This work describes pharmaceutical aspects of some peptide vaccines based on T and B cell epitopes, from the initial computer-aided design to their synthesis, characterization, and use in mice, and finally the results of ELISA assays. The B cell epitopes were chosen to mimic the CDR-H3 loop of an anti-DNA antibody, intended as a model for targeting undesirable (autoimmune or cancerous) B cell clones. These assays show the increase in cross-reactivity with their parent protein with repeated immunization. The T cell epitope was used in a dose response study (a 300-fold range in dose) comparing the epitope, its incorporation into a multiple antigenic peptide (MAP), and its parent protein (chicken hen egg lysozyme, HEL), and controls, all fluorescently labeled.
Autorenporträt
After receiving his doctorate in Pharmaceutics and Pharmaceutical Chemistry from the University of Utah, James S. Cavenaugh went to Oxford University for a postdoc while working at MRC Laboratories, The Gambia, as an immunologist in a clinical trial, thence to Los Alamos, NM. He is now a computational immunologist at the University of Rochester.
