New approach enhances vaccination

Vaccines must elicit immune responses of a sufficient magnitude and quality to prevent or treat disease. While existing vaccine technologies are capable of achieving this goal for many diseases, these strategies have thus far proven inadequate against global threats like HIV and cancer. Cincinnati Children’s inventors discovered a key role for the protein perforin in restraining immune responses after vaccination. These inventors identified a selective small molecule inhibitor of perforin that enhances the scope and caliber of vaccine-elicited immune responses. The capacity of this invention to bolster the efficacy of emerging vaccines for difficult to prevent diseases represents a new tool for combating threats to human health.

Applications: Use as an adjuvant to enhance the capacity of vaccines to prevent or treat disease

Advantages

• Can be combined with existing vaccine regimens to enhance suboptimal efficacy
• Broad utility, most notably in the infectious diseases and cancer vaccines fields