Dr Thao-Thy Pham, Institute of Tropical Medicine Antwerp, Belgium - VALIDATE Fellow
Establishing the immunogenicity of the first naturally presented Leishmania epitope vaccine candidates in Ethiopian cutaneous leishmaniasis
Project Aims
Leishmaniasis is a severe disease with no vaccine currently available. The disease is caused by the Leishmania parasite and can lead to different clinical presentations such as the visceral lethal complications or various forms of cutaneous lesions. Previous research suggests that variations in the parasite's genes and how the host’s immune system responds to these variations may influence the disease development. We suspect this could be due to differences in how the parasite's antigens are presented to the T cells of the immune system.
Recently, we used a new method called immunopeptidomics to analyse samples from lesions of patients with cutaneous leishmaniasis. This resulted in a very first list of Leishmania antigens that are actually presented to the T cells of the immune system. These results are biologically more relevant from earlier Leishmania vaccine candidates found by other groups who used bioinformatical prediction algorithms. Our immunopeptidomics findings suggest that the different clinical presentations of cutaneous leishmaniasis may show different numbers and/or types of these Leishmania antigens which further strengthens our hypothesis.
In this project, I aim to confirm whether these newly identified Leishmania antigens could indeed be promising vaccine candidates. First, I will assess if the Leishmania antigens are recognised by the host’s T cells in samples of patients with cutaneous leishmaniasis, and how strong and common this recognition is. Additionally, I will develop a novel method to see if these Leishmania antigens can induce a protective T cell response which will be a crucial feature for a vaccine target. Ultimately, my goal is to speed up vaccine development for leishmaniasis, which is currently at a standstill.
Find out more about Dr Thao-Thy Pham here.
