Vaccines, in today’s modern forms, have been available since 1940's and the childhood vaccination efforts belong to the greatest medical achievements so far. However, we still have a number of infectious diseases, both old and new, that lack efficient enough vaccines. For this reason, we aim at performing research on how to develop new vaccine candidates against challenging microbes such as human immunodeficiency viruses type 1 (HIV-1) and influenza A/B viruses.
Not only will we need new vaccine products (i.e DNA-vaccines, Viral vectors, recombinant proteins), we should also consider how vaccines should be administered, instead of by syringe and needles (as most often today).
Since most of our infectious disease-causing agents infect us by mucosal routes, and our vaccines most often do not stimulate immune responses in the mucosal tissues, we support the idea of developing vaccination procedures that could be used to elicit both mucosal and systemic immunity against the infectious microorganisms. Some vaccine products are also too weak as immunogens by themselves to provide efficient immunity. In these cases, they may benefit by the use of vaccine-adjuvant combinations that stimulate immune responses.
Our work is thus focused on how to provide neutralizing antibodies, long-lasting memory B- and T-lymphocytes in mucosal tissues and lymphoid tissues against pathogenic microorganisms.
