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Engineering vaccines with heterologous B and T cell epitopes using immunoglobulin genes

Nature Biotechnology volume 15, pages 882–886 (1997)Cite this article

Abstract

Antibodies engineered in their variable domain to express epitopes of heterologous antigens—antigenized antibodies—function as immunogens. Only the third complementarity-determining region (CDR3) of the H chain has been used as the site of epitope expression, as this loop has the highest natural variability in length and amino acid composition. We demonstrate that the CDR2 can be engineered to express a 12–amino acid peptide, which is a T-cell determinant that enhances the response to a B-cell eprtope peptide of Plasmodium falciparum expressed in the CDR3 of the same variable domain. Mice with this gene inoculated into the spleen mounted an antibody response against the B-cell eprtope higher than mice receiving the gene coding for the B-cell eprtope only. In vitro studies established that the two epitopes were independently immunogenic in vivo.

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Author information

Author notes

  1. Maurizio Zanetti: Corresponding author (e-mail: mzanetti@UCSD.edu).

  2. Sidong Xiong and Mara Gerloni: S.X. and M.G. have contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Department of Medicine and Cancer Center, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Oilman Dr., La Jolla, CA, 92093-0063

    Sidong Xiong

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  1. Sidong Xiong
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Xiong, S., Gerloni, M. & Zanetti, M. Engineering vaccines with heterologous B and T cell epitopes using immunoglobulin genes. Nat Biotechnol 15, 882–886 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt0997-882

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