Studies on the Pathogenesis of Hepatitis A and Feasibility Studies on a Hepatitis A Vaccine.
Abstract
The objectives of this work are to further our knowledge of the pathogenesis of hepatitis A virus (HAV) infection in man, and to develop recombinant expression vectors for hepatitis A virus antigens that can be used to stimulate mucosal immunity. Two viral cDNA sequences encoding different forms of capsid proteins have been successfully cloned into several bacterial expression vector plasmids, transformed into E. coli and analyzed. Expression tests are still in progress. An in situ hybridization procedure has been developed, using probes developed in our cloning experiments. This procedure can readily detect HAV-infected cultured cells, and is now ready to be applied to fixed animal tissue sections. HAV is being grown in small scale in our laboratory, and a 'dot blot' hybridization procedure has been developed to understand the course of infection. A variety of human acute and convalescent sera have been obtained for analysis of the anti-HAV antibody specificity by immunoblot tests against virus, viral capsid proteins and infected cell extracts. These experiments should help advance our understanding of the pathogenesis of enteric virus infections and begin to elucidate new strategies for the construction of viral vaccines.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Mar 14, 1986
- Accession Number
- ADA178068
Entities
People
- Donald F. Summers
- Elvera Ehrenfeld
- Oliver C. Richards
Organizations
- University of Utah