Journal of Infectious Diseases & Therapy
Open Access

Abstract

Human infection with the new subtype influenza A virus is associated with a high mortality and morbidity and causes worldwide pandemic. There is necessity to improve a universal vaccine against influenza pandemic and produce protective immunity by inducing strain-specific neutralizing antibodies to the viral hemagglutinin. For this purpose we have designed a novel multiple linear epitopes (B-cell, CTL and Th) immunogenic based on the hemagglutinin proteins backbone containing human T cell epitopes for H1 & H3 subtype. In this study, we use the epitope-based vaccine design by using immunoinformatics approach in order to predict the binding of B-cell and T-cell epitopes (class I and class II human leukocyte antigen [HLA]). BCPREDS was used to predict the B-cell epitope. Propred, Propred I, netMHCpan and netMHCIIpan, were used to predict the T-cell epitope. All epitopes were checked by epitope mapping, NCBI ORF Finder, ExPASy, Swiss-Pdb Viewer and Protean. This sequence was cloned into the prokaryotic expression vector peT41a. BALB/c mice were immunized with different dosages of recombinant protein and the immune responses were determined in the form of protective response against influenza virus, antibodies titers (IgG1 and IgG2a), spleen cell lymphocyte proliferation and the levels of interferon-�³ and interleukin-4 cytokines. We observed an increase in the number of influenza virusspecific IFN�³-secreting splenocytes, composed of populations marked by CD4+ and CD8+ T cells producing IFN�³ or TNF�±. Upon challenge with influenza virus, the vaccinated mice exhibited decreased viral load in the lungs and a delay in mortality. These findings suggest that human multi-epitope recombinant influenza virus proteins are a valid approach for a general T-cell vaccine to protect against influenza virus infection.

Biography

Email: mousavian991@gmail.com