CPB 697 RESEARCH SEMINAR

DEPARTMENT OF COMPARATIVE PATHOBIOLOGY

Dina Moustafa, BSc, MSc

Graduate Student in Immunology

Department of Comparative Pathobiology

Purdue University

“Brucella As A Vector For Developing Cancer Vaccines”

Thursday, December 6, 2007

VPTH 112

3:30 p.m.

ABSTRACT:

Cancer vaccines represent one of the promising immunotherapies designed to activate the immune system to destroy tumor cells. On going strategies in designing cancer vaccines rely on the delivery of tumor associated antigen (TAA) through a vector that possesses a strong immunostimualtory feature. Our objective is to determine the potential usefulness of Brucella as a vector for developing effective cancer vaccines. Members of genus Brucella are gram negative facultative intracellular bacteria which can stimulate strong cell-mediated immune responses in the infected host. Brucella can be engineered to express foreign proteins and immunization of animals with such recombinant Brucella results in the development of antigen-specific immune responses. In this seminar, our ongoing efforts to utilize B. abortus RB51 and B. neotomae as vectors to express TAAs of three different mouse cancer cell lines will be discussed.