Vaccinated Mice Fail To Pass Immunity To Offspring.(against rotavirus infections)

2001 SEP 19 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) --

by N.R. Saltmarsh, staff medical writer - Intranasal delivery of rotavirus VP2 and VP6 antigens stimulates a specific antibody response in female mice but fails to passively protect their offspring, say researchers in Switzerland.

Since young infants are the group most affected by rotavirus diarrhea, A. Coste and colleagues at the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research hoped to start by inducing rotavirus protection in the mothers.

"Mucosal antibody responses are required to cure the infection, and mucosal administration of rotavirus-like particles induces protective immunity without requiring a mucosal adjuvant such as cholera toxin," said Coste and coworkers.

The rotavirus protein VP6 is protective against adult rotavirus in the mouse and Salmonella typhimurium is an epithelium-invasive bacterium that induces specific immune responses in mucosal tissues against itself and carried antigens, they added.

"We investigated the capacity of alive recombinant S. typhimurium vaccine to stimulate antibody responses against rotavirus," reported Coste and team. "We constructed an attenuated S. typhimurium strain simultaneously producing VP6 and VP2 rotavirus proteins in the cytoplasm. In contrast to expression in eukaryotic cells, VP6 and VP2 did not form virus-like particles in our bacterial system."

Female mice that received intranasal administration of ...