Immunogenicity and Protective Efficacy against Murine Tuberculosis of a Prime-Boost Regimen with BCG and a DNA Vaccine Expressing ESAT-6 and Ag85A Fusion Protein.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Clinical and Developmental Immunology Volume 2011, Article ID 617892, 10 pages doi:10.1155/2011/617892 Research Article Immunogenicity and Protective Efficacy against Murine Tuberculosis of a Prime-Boost Regimen with BCG and a DNA Vaccine Expressing ESAT-6 and Ag85A Fusion Protein Jia Lu,1 Chun Wang,1 Zhiguang Zhou,1 Ying Zhang,2 Tingting Cao,1 Chunwei Shi,1 Zhenhua Chen,1 Lingxia Chen,1 Changxue Cai,1 and Xionglin Fan1 1 Laboratory of Biosafety, Department of Pathogen Biology, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science Technology, no.13, Hangkong Road, Wuhan 430030, China 2 Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology, Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21205, USA Correspondence should be addressed to Changxue Cai, caichangxue@21 and Xionglin Fan, xionglinfan@ Received 18 September 2010; Accepted 30 December 2010 Academic Editor: James Triccas Copyright © 2011 Jia Lu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Heterologous prime-boost regimens utilizing BCG as a prime vaccine probably represent the best hope for the development of novel tuberculosis (TB) vaccines. In this study, we examined the immunogenicity and protective efficacy of DNA vaccine (pcD685A) expressing the fusion protein of Ag85A and ESAT-6 (r685A) and its booster effects in BCG-immunized mice. The recombinant r685A fusion protein stimulated higher level of antigen-specific IFN-γ release in tuberculin skin test- (TST-) positive healthy household contacts of active pulmonary TB patients than that in TST-negative population. Vaccinati