Nearly half of the world's population is infected with Helicobacter pylori. Clinical manifestations of this infection range from gastritis and peptic ulcers to gastric adenocarcinoma and lymphoma. Due to the emerging of antibiotic resistant strains and poor patient compliance of the antibiotic therapy, there is increasing interest in the development of a protective vaccine against H. pylori infection. The bacterial protein FliD forms a capping structure on the end of each flagellum which is critical to prevent depolymerization and structural degradation. In this study, the potential of FliD as a prospective H. pylori subunit vaccine was assessed. For this purpose, immunogenicity and protective efficacy of recombinant FliD (rFliD) from H. pylori was evaluated in C57BL/6 mice. Purified rFliD was formulated with different adjuvants and administered via subcutaneous or oral route. Subcutaneous immunization with rFliD elicited predominantly mixed Th1 and Th17 immune responses, with high titers of specific IgG and IgG. Splenocytes of immunized mice exhibited strong antigen-specific memory responses, resulting in the secretion of high amounts of IFN-γ and IL-17, and low levels of IL-4. Immunization with rFliD caused a significant reduction in H. pylori bacterial load relative to naïve control mice (p < 0.001), demonstrating a robust protective effect. Taken together, these results suggest that subcutaneous vaccination with rFliD formulated with CpG or Addavax could be considered as a potential candidate for the development of a subunit vaccine against H. pylori infection.
Helicobacter pylori is a global health problem which has encouraged scientists to find new ways to diagnose, immunize and eradicate the H. pylori infection. In silico studies are a promising approach to design new chimeric antigen having the immunogenic potential of several antigens. In order to obtain such benefit in H. pylori vaccine study, a chimeric gene containing four fragments of FliD sequence (1-600 bp), UreB (327-334 bp),VacA (744-805 bp) and CagL(51-100 bp) which have a high density of B- and T-cell epitopes was designed. The secondary and tertiary structures of the chimeric protein and other properties such as stability, solubility and antigenicity were analyzed. The in silico results showed that after optimizing for the purpose of expression in Escherichia coli BL21, the solubility and antigenicity of the construct fragments were highly retained. Most regions of the chimeric protein were found to have a high antigenic propensity and surface accessibility. These results would be useful in animal model application and accounted for the development of an epitope-based vaccine against the H. pylori.
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