The earliest vaccines were inactivated or attenuated forms of pathogens that stimulated responses to many components of the pathogen including those that were non-protective. Vaccines that fall into this category include polio, tetanus and influenza. A major patented discovery within the EBV Unit has been to engineer many of these epitopes to yield a vaccine that resembles a string of beads ie a contiguous array of epitopes. This string of beads is referred to as a polytope. Polytope vaccines towards EBV, HIV and melanoma are planned for co-development with commercial vaccine manufacturers.
Successful vaccines rely on a full understanding of the immune mechanisms that protect from disease.
The EBV Unit has been in the forefront of defining the components of the immune system that protect from EBV infection and how this protection fails in certain circumstances, resulting in cancer. All the evidence points to a major role for killer lymphocytes. The Unit is currently conducting trials in collaboration with transplant units throughout Australia to determine whether this new approach is superior to chemotherapy which is the current treatment. This characteristic of the virus is pivotal in understanding the basic mechanism whereby this virus can cause cancer. We are tracking EBV proteins in cells to determine how they interact with normal cellular proteins and wish to determine how this leads ultimately to transformation of white cells.