Progress made in vaccines against gastrointestinal helminth parasites.

2004 MAR 31 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- Scientists are making progress in developing vaccines against most important gastrointestinal helminth parasites of humans and animals.

According to a study from Poland, "Among many vaccine approaches developed against gastrointestinal helminths in the recent years, parenteral vaccination and use of recombinant helminth antigens expressed in various expression systems have been a major focus. Significant progress has been made toward cloning of protective worm antigens. The recombinant proteins have several benefits over classic vaccine technologies, including increased safety, economy, stability, and versatility."

"Moreover, the identification of site and developmental stage of the parasite in which the expression of genes encoding for potential vaccine antigen become possible using a variety of molecular techniques including hybridization in situ, expressed sequence tags analysis or cDNA microarray technology," reported Halina Wedrychowicz and Marcin Wisniewski at the Warsaw Agriculture University. "Unfortunately, in the research reported so far little attention has been paid to oral vaccination, which may be of particular importance for the development of protective immunity against enteric parasites."

"The biggest obstacles to vaccine production at present time are lack of an efficient ...