The public defence will be held as a video conference over Zoom.
The defence will follow regular procedure as far as possible, hence it will be open to the public and the audience can ask ex auditorio questions when invited to do so.
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Digital Trial Lecture – time and place
Adjudication committee
- First opponent: Professor Hedda Wardemann, Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum, Germany
- Second opponent: Professor Anke Huckriede, University Medical Center Groningen, The Netherlands
- Third member and chair of the evaluation committee: Professor Erik Dissen, University of Oslo
Chair of the Defence
Associate Professor Andreas Lossius, Faculty of Medicine, University of Oslo
Principal Supervisor
Professor Bjarne Bogen, Faculty of Medicine, University of Oslo
Summary
Vaccination is one of the most successful public health interventions. Unfortunately, some pathogens can escape immune responses through mutations of their surface proteins, and are challenging to target with vaccines. New vaccine technologies are necessary to overcome these challenges. Here, we developed a novel DNA vaccine platform that encodes heterodimeric vaccine proteins. The vaccine proteins target antigens to antigen presenting cells in the body to increase the efficacy of the immune response.
Using a heterodimerization motif, the novel DNA vaccine platform combines two dissimilar peptide chains that each contain an antigen and a motif that targets antigen presenting cells. The vaccine platform was effective at inducing protective antibody and T cell responses in mice against both tumor and influenza antigens.
Antibody responses were significantly boosted with DNA vaccines that encoded antigen bivalent dimers with two identical hemagglutinins from one influenza virus. Antigen bivalency was less important for T cell activation. Alternatively, vaccines that combined sixteen different hemagglutinin proteins, arranged as monovalent antigens, induced cross-reactive antibodies and T cells against heterologous hemagglutinin proteins. These cross-reactive immune responses partially protected mice from infection with a heterologous influenza virus.
These results underscore how we could implement our new vaccine platform to induce different types of immune responses. Furthermore, we show that the vaccine platform can be an interesting tool to induce cross-reactive antibody responses that target conserved epitopes on variable pathogens. This is an important property to protect against continuously mutating pathogens.
Additional information
Contact the research support staff.