Virus like particles of the Junin virus Z protein (JUNV Z-VLPs) as a biological vehicle of antigens and vaccine adjuvants.

PASTORINI MERCEDES; DE GANZÓ AGUSTÍN; BORIO CRISTINA; GOÑI SANDRA; ALEMÁN MERCEDES; DUARTE ALEJANDRA

Congreso; SAIC; 2018

Virus-like particles (VLPs) are non-genomic nanostructures assembled from viral structural proteins. VLPs are incapable of infection or self-replicate due to the lack of genome yet their protein retain the antigenicity capable of induce cellular and human immune responses which makes VLPs potential viral-based vaccines. Currently, several licensed VLP vaccines are already being used against human and zoonotic pathogens. Arenavirus matrix Z protein plays an important role in virus budding and is able to generate enveloped virus-like-particles (Z-VLPs) in absence of any other viral proteins. We previously demonstrated that Z-VLP induce maturation of dendritic cells (DCs) derived from bone marrow balb/c mice testified by a boost of surface markers MHC class II and CD86 levels. The antigen presentations cells (APCs), DCs and macrophages, are found throughout the body as sentinels. They main aim of these cells is to continuously search for pathogens and present different antigens to activate the induction of an adaptive immune response.We hypothesized that Z-VLPs could be efficient immunogens and excellent tools for vaccine purposes due to the fact that VLPs may promote adaptive immune response through the activation of APCs.In this work we study the expression of different surface markers in different subset of DCs treated with Z-VLP for 24 h. We demonstrated an increased level of CD40 (p