Novel molecules developed at UB can boost vacci...(nderserved areas said Connell. If I...),Health

If I want to immunize somebody in Uganda with a vaccine that must be injected, for instance, I have to bring needles, everything must be sterile and everything must be kept cold, which means we need refrigeration.

But if I can vaccinate through the nose, all I have to do is dry the antigen and my adjuvant. When I get to the middle of Uganda, I boil some water, pour in the antigen and adjuvant, stir it up, put it in an atomizer and sniff. The mixture doesnt even have to be sterile, because the nose isnt sterile.

Connell began studying the two adjuvants as a postdoctoral researcher at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USUHS) in Washington, D.C., in 1989. The molecules had been isolated five years earlier by Randall Holmes, M.D., Ph.D., his post-doctoral advisor. Connell began his investigations into the activities of LT-IIa and LT-IIb at the USUHS by mapping the regions of the two enterotoxins that were important for receptor binding, toxicity and for assembly of the multisubunit proteins.

LT-IIa and LT -IIb are similar to cholera toxin in 3-dimentional structure and toxic activity. Yet, the amino-acid sequences of the binding subunits of LT-IIa and LT-IIb are significantly different from the amino-acid sequence of the binding subunit of cholera toxin. These amino acid differences underlie the specificity of LT-IIa and LT-IIb for ganglioside receptors, which are different from the ganglioside bound by cholera toxin. [A ganglioside is a complex molecule that contains both lipids and carbohydrates and is found in the outer membrane of many kinds of cells.]

Connell hypothesizes that it is these different ganglioside-binding activities that contribute to the unique immunological activities of LT-IIa and LT-IIb.

Basically, LT-IIa and LT-IIb are molecules you can add to any vaccine candidate to augment the immune response to that protein, whatever it may be, Connell sta
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