A vaccination strategy against Chlamydia and other sexually transmitted diseases

Brief Description

No vaccines exist against the common sexually-transmitted disease, Chlamydia. The current invention is a novel vaccination formulation wherein fragments from two different microbial proteins, one each from a Chlamydia species and a Neisseria species are fused together. This novel fusion protein is proposed as a robust vaccine to provide protection against Chlamydia.

Full Description

In the US alone, over 1 million cases of Chlamydia are reported each year. Increasing prevalence of Multiple-Drug Resistant Chlamydia is rendering antibiotic treatment increasingly ineffective. Furthermore, there is no effective vaccine on the market. Current experimental vaccines against Chlamydia use a complete protein from the pathogen as the vaccine. The properties of this protein include low solubility, low stability, and the need for detergent solubilization during purification – consequently resulting in a relatively ineffective vaccine.

The current invention circumvents these problems by using a mix-and-match approach of combining proteins - a specific sub-region from this same Chlamydia protein and the entire protein from a different Neisseria species. This fusion protein has the potential to be a very effective vaccine against Chlamydia

Advantages

§ By design, only a fragment of the Chlamydia protein is included in the protein fusion so that expression and purification steps are easier, and less expensive than for the whole protein.

§ Careful choice of the Chlamydia protein fragment, and fusion to the Neisseria protein, vastly increase likelihood of a robust immune response and an effective vaccine.

Patent Status

State Of Development

Protocols for recombinant protein expression from an E. coli vector, purification, and vaccine administration in mice are already available in order to establish proof-of-concept for vaccine design.

Related Materials

• Cheng, C.; Pal, S.; Tifrea, D.; Jia, Z.; and de la Maza, L. M. Microbes Infect. 2014, 16, 244-52. - 03/01/2014