virus like particles of the Junin Z protein (Z-VLP) as a biological vehicle of antigens as vaccine adjuvants

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

Mar del Plata

Congreso; Reunión Anual de la Sociedad Argentina de Inmunología; 2018

Virus-like particles (VLPs) are nanostructure that are assembled from viral structural proteins and are devoid of any genetic material are increasingly being considered as potential viral vaccines. Due to the non-genome nature, VLPs are incapable of infection or self-replication, yet remain the efficient antigenicity required for immune response. At present, several licensed VLP vaccines are already being used clinically against pathogens. Arenavirus matrix protein Z 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 increase the levels of surface markers MHC class II and CD86. The antigen presentations cells (APCs), dendritic cells and macrophages, are found throughout the body and serve as sentinels. They continuously sample the host environment for the presence of pathogens and present antigens to promote the induction of an adaptive immune response.We hypothesized that this Z-VLP could be a good immunogen and excellent tools for vaccine purposes because this molecule may promote adaptative immune response activating APCs.In this work we study de expression of different surface markers in different subset of DCs treated with Z-VLP for 24 h. We demonstrated an increase level of CD40 (p