Each year, approximately five million people die worldwide from putatively vaccine-preventable mucosally transmitted diseases. With respect to mass vaccination campaigns, one strategy to cope with this formidable challenge is aerosol vaccine delivery, which offers potential safety, logistical, and cost-saving advantages over traditional vaccination routes. Additionally, aerosol vaccination may elicit pivotal mucosal immune responses that could contain or eliminate mucosally transmitted pathogens in a preventative or therapeutic vaccine context. In this current preclinical non-human primate investigation, we demonstrate the feasibility of aerosol vaccination with the recombinant poxvirus-based vaccine vectors NYVAC and MVA. Real-time in vivo scintigraphy experiments with radiolabeled, aerosol-administered NYVAC-C (Clade C, HIV-1 vaccine) and MVA-HPV vaccines revealed consistent mucosal delivery to the respiratory tract. Furthermore, aerosol delivery of the vaccines was safe, inducing no vaccine-associated pathology, in particular in the brain and lungs, and was immunogenic. Administration of a DNA-C/NYVAC-C prime/boost regime resulted in both systemic and anal-genital HIV-specific immune responses that were still detectable 5 months after immunization. Thus, aerosol vaccination with NYVAC and MVA vectored vaccines constitutes a tool for large-scale vaccine efforts against mucosally transmitted pathogens.MVA HPV ͉ non-human primate ͉ NYVAC HIV ͉ preclinical study ͉ aerosol vaccine assessment

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Low-frequency Raman spectra for syndiotactic polystyrene (sPS) and their solvent complexes are reported. A broad, intense, polarized band centered at approximately 50 cm-1 is observed for polystyrene independent of tacticity, degree of crystallinity, or molecular weight, and is assigned to the phenyl ring torsion about the backbone. The intensity and polarization characteristics of this vibration have been analyzed. The 50-cm"1 band has different intensities and bandwidths in different crystalline phases of syndiotactic polystyrene. Another intense, relatively sharp component observed at 52 cm"1 is present only in the helical crystalline polymer-solvent complex. The 52-cm'1 component disappears upon removal of solvent and is sensitive to interaction of the sPS phenyl ring with solvent. The observation of a sharp component for a specific crystalline state suggests that examination of this band may be useful as a molecular probe of the environment, and possibly free volume, of the phenyl ring in polystyrenes.

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