Development of Peptide Vaccines against HPV-16 Associated Cervical Cancer and Group A Streptococci

摘要

Vaccination has proven to be one of the most successful and cost-effective public health interventions. While vaccines exist to prevent many diseases, opportunities still exist for development of new vaccines or to further improve existing vaccines. An area of recent interest is mucosal vaccine delivery. This entails the administration of vaccines to mucosal membranes, resulting in induction of both mucosal and systemic immune responses. Many advantages are offered by this technique, including ease of administration and improved patient compliance. One technique examined for mucosal immunization is peptide lipidation. A system of interest to our group is the Lipid Core Peptide (LCP) system. This system incorporates peptide antigens, a poly-lysine multiple antigen peptide (MAP) system, and synthetic lipidic amino acids into a single molecular entity. Our group has investigated this system for the synthesis of novel vaccines against many diseases. Of recent interest is the utilization of this system for the production of therapeutic and prophylactic vaccines against Human Papillomavirus Type-16 (HPV-16) associated cervical cancer (Fig. 1), and prophylactic vaccines against Group A Streptococcal (GAS) strains common to the Australian aboriginal populations of Northern Queensland and the Northern Territory. Of particular interest to our group is the utilization of peptide ligation and fragment condensation to synthesize highly pure LCP analogs (Fig. 2). It is the aim of our research to produce a highly pure, well characterized analog of the LCP system using these techniques.