Instant vaccine development

The importance of preventive vaccines is beyond any discussion while the interest in the development of therapeutic vaccines notably in oncology is steadily increasing. However a major stumbling block is the lack of speed of preclinical vaccine development. The main reason is that performing vaccination tests in experimental animals is essential, but very slow. Especially for development of therapeutic vaccines in oncology many rounds of repeated, time consuming, vaccinations are required because the targets in oncology are usually self proteins of the host and thus weak antigens. A single vaccination experiment may take several months before it can be read. Preclinical development requiring many sequential vaccination rounds may therefore take years. This makes the development of immunotherapeutics, very expensive and thus risky and forms as such a major barrier to progress in this area. The object of this proposal is to develop a sensitive and rapid technology that allows early in the immune response (i.e. 7 to 14 days after vaccination) the detection of the frequencies of the early antibody producing B cells with the desired antigen specificity in each individual, vaccinated animal. This will allow fast assessment of the quality of candidate vaccines in a relative high throughput fashion. Proof of principle was obtained for small antigens (peptides). In this project we will extend and validate this approach for specific antigenic sites of large proteins.