Lead author Dr. Kumar Nagarathinam recalls that nearly 60 million people live with chronic HCV infection, leading to 290,000 deaths each year, directly caused by complications such as liver cirrhosis and cancer. liver. Although modern antiviral treatments achieve high cure rates, global elimination of HCV remains an elusive goal due to insufficiently early detection and limited treatment options.
Indeed, if HCV remains the cause of a significant burden of morbidity, it is therefore well considered as one of the priority endemic pathogens on a global scale for research and development of vaccines in the “Program of vaccination 2030” of the World Health Organization (WHO),
There is currently no effective vaccine to limit its spread.
The studyavant-garde, is now laying the foundations for a new generation of vaccines. The team uses new computational designs of proteins to mimic specific regions of the viral E1 and E2 glycoproteins, or neutralization epitopes. Integrated into nanoparticles, they can induce the most effective immune response possible.
In vitro and in vivo tests (in mouse models of hepatitis C) demonstrate that:
-- these immunogens trigger a robust immune response;
- the antibodies produced are well capable of successfully neutralizing several genetically diverse strains of HCV.
Very promising first results for the development of new generation vaccines, effective against HCV and a new platform for producing proteins “programmed” by computer which could be useful to fight against other important viruses.
Health
