Research Associate

Center for Immunology and Infectious Disease

Albany Medical College (Albany, NY)

Deborah Fuller

Development of an effective PMED DNA vaccine against seasonal and pandemic influenza.

Antibody responses induced by exisiting influenza vaccines protect against homologous viruses but are less effective against antigenic variants and provide little, if any, protection against different subtypes. In addition, existing vaccine strategies will be ineffective in the event of an influenza pandemic due to their lengthy manufacturing process. Thus, new vaccine strategies are needed that can both accelerate production and provide broader protection against seasonal and pandemic strains of influenza. DNA vaccines represent an attractive approach due to the speed at which they can be produced and their ability to elicit robust cellular and humoral immunity. We hypothesize that a DNA vaccine capable of inducing broad CTL responses to highly conserved regions of internal viral proteins, in addition to high titers of antibody specific for the viral HA gene products, will provide the broad spectrum of anti-viral immunity needed to confer protection against an influenza pandemic. We will employ particle-mediated epidermal delivery (PMED), also know as the gene gun, of an optimized DNA vaccine to test this hypothesis.